


Dog.

by teasoni



Series: Fourth Law of Robotics [1]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Android Gore (Detroit: Become Human), Blow Jobs, Case Fic, Collars, Customizable Android Genitalia (Detroit: Become Human), Developing Relationship, Deviant Upgraded Connor | RK900, Dom/sub, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Light Masochism, M/M, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Praise Kink, Slow Burn, Touch-Starved, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:49:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 40,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26492200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teasoni/pseuds/teasoni
Summary: After the success of Hank Anderson and the RK800, "Connor", the Detroit Police Department takes on a new RK900 unit. Unfortunately for the RK900, he is partnered with the DPD's most volatile, ill-tempered, and aggressive officer: Gavin Reed.As both their assignment and their relationship grows more complex, RK900 is forced to come to terms with his own deviancy, and things begin to go in a direction nobody expected.[now served with a side of hankcon]
Relationships: Hank Anderson/Connor, Upgraded Connor | RK900/Gavin Reed
Series: Fourth Law of Robotics [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1933114
Comments: 48
Kudos: 280





	1. I

The first thing that the RK900 learns about Detective Gavin Reed is that he is, for want of a better word, _abrasive_. Or, perhaps, there are many words that are just as suitable, as Lieutenant Anderson seems to think of at least a dozen every time they cross paths, but _abrasive_ seems the most fitting. Gavin Reed looks only a little less rough than he acts – it’s a different kind of tired than the lieutenant, one that’s borne less upon sadness and more upon the desperation to escape something. RK900 doesn’t know what Gavin Reed is trying to escape. He figures it isn’t any of his business.

He is first exposed to the detective’s abrasiveness when Fowler assigns them as partners. Almost a year has passed since the uprising of androids and their success in establishing themselves as sentient beings. Attaining rights remained a far-off dream, but to have their autonomy accepted is a step in the right direction. CyberLife’s own specially-made deviant hunter, RK800 ( _Connor,_ as they called him) had himself become deviant, and had joined the DPD shortly after ensuring the success of the revolution in Detroit. RK900 isn’t sure what to think about it. He hasn’t really been around long enough to form an opinion.

The RK900 deviated upon activation thanks to his predecessor, who personally infected him with the code, but he clings to his pre-existing programming because he doesn’t know any better. He had only a few brief days out in the world before he was coaxed into the service of the Detroit Police by Connor, who considered it in his best interests. RK900 had no particular desire to work there, but his programming had a strange way of keeping him on edge, and it made sense to adopt a vocation he was – quite literally – made for. The DPD didn’t seem opposed to the idea, either. Connor is good at what he does. _Very_ good. The RK900 model was designed to be even better.

But then there is Gavin Reed. RK900 can’t understand why Reed would work a job he professes to hate, but he can understand why Fowler teamed them up.

“He needs a firm hand,” the captain explained after Reed had stormed out of the office in a garble of expletives. “Someone who can keep him in line.”

A pause. RK900 thinks – something he still isn’t very used to doing. He doesn’t like the need to pause when he does, despite the fact that his processors work at almost one million times the speed of a human brain. “I’ll do my best, captain.”

Fowler just looked at him with something uncomfortably close to pity.

The rest of the homicide department are wary of him. He’s big – bigger than Connor in all aspects – and even though he’s more aloof than hostile, many of the humans are put off by it. It’s too… mechanical. He doesn’t bother trying to correct it. Connor seems to be the only one to fully accept his presence there.

RK900 likes watching Connor. They’re so similar that he doesn’t really need to wonder after his programming – Connor is just a little simpler, a little slower, a little weaker, but more or less the same, the foundation upon which RK900 was built. _Less_ in all aspects of the word, and yet somehow he still manages to be more. The way he moves is easy and natural. He postures without thinking about it, leans into very human habits, and smiles often. In fact, if it wasn’t for his LED, it would be difficult to tell him apart at all. He was made to be adaptable, after all. RK900 wasn’t so lucky.

After their assignment, Gavin Reed doesn’t return to the precinct for the rest of the day. Another officer, Tina, shows RK900 to his desk and apologizes for Reed’s behavior, looking a little abashed as she does. An embarrassment that isn’t her own. Interesting. It didn’t add up, at least not to RK900, but he had enough knowledge of social protocol to dismiss her concerns.

“He’s a bit… abrasive,” she explains as RK900 surveys the space. His LED flickers at the word. _Abrasive_. It’s the first time he hears the word and he knows immediately that it is _exactly_ right. He looks at her again and doesn’t smile.

“I can assure you that it does not bother me, Officer Chen, but thank you for your concern.” He has the same soft voice as Connor does, though his has a sharper edge to it, something flinty hidden in his coding that he can’t seem to find a reason for. He chalks it up to intimidation, much like the rest of him. Despite that, though, Tina offers him a small smile, and for a moment RK900 thinks she’s going to touch him. She doesn’t.

“Let me know if you need anything!” she calls as she makes her way back across the bullpen. RK900 watches her go and spends a moment processing their interaction. Then he sits down and interfaces with the terminal, accessing the databases and staff records while simultaneously doing a preliminary sweep of their firewalls. The DPD’s access coding would take him an estimated 0.25 minutes to override, but he supposes they really don’t know any better.

Connor and Lieutenant Anderson arrive a few hours later. Connor chose to abandon his CyberLife uniform soon after he deviated, and his fashion sense seems to have been dangerously influenced by the lieutenant’s. Even RK900 can tell he looks nice, though, because Connor was designed to look nice in anything. He’s a little less meticulously groomed now. More relaxed. It’s nice, though, and by the way Anderson looks at him, he thinks it’s nice as well.

“Hello,” Connor greets RK900 the moment he sets eyes on him, making a beeline straight for RK900’s desk. His face is open, eager, LED blinking at his temple. “Ah – have you come up with a name, yet? It feels weird calling you _RK900_ all the time.”

“No,” RK900 replies. “Not yet. I have only been active for a few days. I haven’t found one I like.”

Connor nods sagely, leaning against the desk with an ease that RK900 envies. It’s at that moment Anderson himself moseys over, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jacket, to stand just behind Connor’s shoulder. “Heard you got assigned to Reed.” He laughs hoarsely; the sound of it is a near-perfect reflection of the look Fowler had given him earlier. “You poor bastard.”

“Officer Chen called him ‘abrasive’,” RK900 says. Hank laughs again, this time little more than a huff. “It seems to be a widely-shared opinion.”

“That’s one way of putting it.” Hank raps his knuckles against the desk before patting Connor’s shoulder. “Come on, kid, let’s leave your little brother to get adjusted.”

Connor lingers only a second longer, giving RK900 a pointed look before he turns on his heel and goes after the lieutenant. _Let me know if you need anything._ It’s the same thing Officer Chen had said. Even though RK900 isn’t the only android in homicide, he gets an inkling that he may as well be.

RK900 doesn’t see Reed again, and by the time the sun sinks behind the jutting teeth of the high rises, he realizes that Reed isn’t coming back.

When Reed shows up for work the next day, RK900 can tell he hasn’t slept a wink – and that’s without scanning his vitals. He’s cantankerous and rude from the moment he sets foot in the door, and if it wasn’t for the tongue-lashing Anderson gives him whenever he’s in earshot, Reed would be left to run rife. RK900 just watches. Analyses. He doesn’t intend to wind Reed up, but he seems to manage it anyway.

“Good morning, Detective Reed,” RK900 begins, his sensors lighting up as his assigned partner finally approaches him. “I look forward to –,”

“Can it,” Reed bites out, making a point of not looking at him. He drops his weight into his desk chair, knees spread, sneer plastered across his face. It’s a bad look on him, RK900 decides. Ugly. “I don’t want you sticking your fingers in my casework. Just sit there like a good robot and don’t bother me.”

Something in RK900’s jaw tightens.

“My job is not to _sit there_ , Detective. I was specifically designed as a law enforcement –,”

Again he is interrupted, this time by Reed’s brassy and entirely unconvincing laugh. “What a fucking joke!” he exclaims like he really can’t believe it. “Listen here, tin man – don’t fucking talk to me or I’ll knock those perfect teeth out. Got it?”

RK900 did get it. For the first time since his activation, he smiles, revealing the very same teeth Reed was threatening. It’s a cold, unpleasant thing that proves effective in wiping the sneer clean off Reed’s face, just as RK900 knew it would.

“You could try,” RK900 replies coolly. “But you would fail.”

There’s a threat there, thinly veiled, and it hit its mark. Reed looks profoundly uncomfortable, an ugly flush spreading along his hairline. Wisely, he decides to drop the conversation.

After Reed receives yet another reprimand from Fowler, they’re assigned a murder-suicide case on the other side of town. It’s relatively simple by RK900’s calculations – an estranged husband murdered his wife before taking his own life. From what he understands, crimes like this are common countrywide, and this appears to be just as linear. It takes RK900 under a minute to read the initial report and less than ten minutes to collate what evidence they have already. He uploads it to the case file with little more than a few flashes of his LED. Reed watches him with narrowed eyes.

“At least you can do the paperwork,” he mutters. “Desk jockey little bitch.” The last part is mumbled under his breath, obviously not meant for RK900 to hear. He does, of course. Any notion that he wouldn’t is perplexing.

“The only reason we were assigned this case is because I am here,” RK900 points out. “If I was not, _you_ would be on desk duty, thanks in no small part to your behavioral record.”

That same flush spreads along Reed’s hairline; RK900 now knows it to be a sign of displeasure. Reed’s shitty behavior is one of the homicide department’s worst-kept secrets. RK900 had brought up Reed’s file the moment they became partners, and it didn’t take a genius to put two and two together. Gavin Reed was a wild card, volatile, and dangerous. But he had occasions of brilliance, too, and had brought about a number of pivotal arrests that he seems strangely reluctant to mention. If RK900 hadn’t read it in his file (which, _technically_ , wasn’t available to someone of his rank – not that it stopped him) he never would have known. RK900 had to wonder after the weight of those arrests given how much Fowler was willing to sweep under the rug. But that was something for another time.

RK900’s most evasive concern, however, was Reed’s hatred of him. At first, RK900 wondered if it could just be for show, like some sort of display of dominance or the marking of territory. But, he came to realize, it ran far deeper than that; it was a hatred that seeped into every action, every word, every glance. It isn’t the kind of hatred that is done for show, and that perplexed him deeply. Human cognition was the one thing RK900 could never seem to anticipate, and that bothered him.

“I am unable to rationalize it,” he told Connor, once, when they were both taking their workplace-sanctioned break. RK900 sat rigidly in the break room while Connor sat beside him, working through something on his tablet. Connor hummed.

“He hates androids,” he replied. “He was incredibly hostile towards me when I first arrived. He threatened to shoot me on multiple occasions.” He tilted his head, then, chewing over a memory with a very faint smile. “Until I handed his ass to him. Now he doesn’t bother me much.”

RK900 said nothing, storing the knowledge away for later.

So, Gavin Reed hates androids. Why? Is it merely because they’re threatening jobs, as he claims? Or is it a matter of self-esteem? Neither of those things sit right with RK900, however. To him, Gavin Reed presents himself as a person with problems far beyond the superficiality of being anti-android. There is a depth to it that RK900 has yet to figure out, but he was designed to solve puzzles like this, after all.

They’re due to visit the scene of the murder-suicide that afternoon. Reed insists there really isn’t any reason to go (“It’s a fucking murder-suicide. What new is there to see?”), but after RK900 challenges his ability as an officer of the law and Fowler tells him off (“This isn’t about you, Reed! RK900 needs some field work, even if it’s an open-and-shut case.”), he relents.

RK900 glances up from his terminal to where Reed is shoving photographs into a folder.

“You’ll crease them if you aren’t careful.”

“Bite me.”

RK900 belatedly realizes the command was rhetoric. Reed clamps the folder under his arm, shoots RK900 one last glare, and stalks off towards the elevator.

* * *

It’s raining by the time they arrive at the crime scene. The neighborhood isn’t a good one, but it isn’t the worst Gavin’s seen. His mind isn’t on the case, anyway, not that it needs to be. It’s straightforward, easy, nothing he hasn’t dealt with before. What is _actually_ stressing him out is sat right next to him in the passenger seat of his fucking car.

Gavin didn’t bother reading the preliminary report. Didn’t need to. His robot repeated it verbatim on the way there, along with all corresponding evidence. It gave Gavin something to chew over for the drive, the clouds darkening the afternoon and making it feel later than it was. The first few specks of rain fell when they were on the motorway, and by the time they drew in to the house, it was bucketing.

“Glad you showed up,” Miller greets them when they arrive. His shoulders glimmer with rain, but he’s in good spirits, which Gavin takes as a good sign. Miller jerks his head towards the door. “Bodies are inside if you want to take a look.”

Gavin doesn’t, not really. He doesn’t particularly enjoy looking at corpses if he doesn’t have to. Unfortunately, however, it’s kind of his job.

The weak light does little to help visibility, and it takes Gavin a minute to adjust to the darkness inside the house. There are other officers inside, only a few, crammed into the hallway. Gavin sidles between them without waiting for the terminator following him like a lap dog. Grin and bear it, as Hank always says.

The bodies are where they’d been found. The woman slumped against the wall, the man prone on the carpet. It takes Gavin ten seconds flat to figure out how it happened. Easy. Man walked in with shotgun, blew a round through the woman’s chest, knocking her against the wall. Man put gun to the underside of his chin, blasted off his own face. Gavin rubs a hand over his mouth. No need for any of that fancy-pants technology.

It’s an easy case to solve. Doesn’t mean it’s any easier to stomach.

He’s acutely aware of the fucking tank of a robot surveying the room. He can see the flash of that little light even without turning; it doesn’t even go yellow. Gavin would give his left arm for a cigarette right about then.

“Detective –,”

“I’m done.” Gavin shoulders past the RK900, catching little more than a slip of gleaming white profile. Just as expected, it follows him right out of the house again. The rain drums against the tin roof, muffling the distant hum of traffic from the inner city. Gavin turns, irritated, to face the RK900. God, he hates the fucking thing, and he hates Fowler for partnering him with it. “What, you’re not gonna stick around? Lick some stuff? Isn’t that what Anderson’s little robot does?”

RK900 doesn’t even flinch. He’s aware that Gavin is trying to get under his skin. “If you are referring to the RK800, then yes. He is equipped with lingual sensors designed to analyze various substances, as am I. I did not feel the need to do so, however. The scene is quite clear.”

At least they can agree on one thing. Gavin turns his back on RK900 and pats down his pockets in search of a cigarette. He comes up empty-handed and swears under his breath. “Whatever. You can write up the report.”

They drive back to the station, and by the time they pull into the parking lot, RK900’s report is finished. He gives it to Gavin to sign off on, and that’s that.

It’s… more underwhelming than RK900 expected. Connor’s promises of fulfilment fall flat. And yet, somehow, RK900 doesn’t mind – he’s more fascinated with the disaster of a detective that is Gavin Reed, who is a mystery to solve in his own right.


	2. II

Gavin swivels restlessly in his chair, feet up on the desk, gnawing the pen between his teeth.

“What crawled up your ass and died?” Hank demands as he passes, throwing a file down on Gavin’s desk.

“What, your boy toy isn’t crawling after you today?” Gavin shoots back. “Maybe you can try the _other_ plastic twink wandering around the office.”

Hank _almost_ laughs. Almost. Instead, though, he crosses his arms across his chest and makes an uncertain sort of noise. “I don’t know,” he says. “Seems like more of a twunk to me.”

Gavin has never been so close to physically assaulting Hank Anderson in his life.

“Where is he, anyway? RK900, I mean.”

Gavin shrugs. “Fuck if I know. Fuck if I _care_. Bastard keeps telling me to keep my feet off the desk and shit.”

Hank wisely doesn’t dignify him with a response. He and Gavin had never really gotten along – their one uniting factor was their mutual hatred of androids, but ever since Connor came along with those big brown eyes and that goofy fucking smile, Hank was a goner. He’d gone from “fuckin’ androids” to literally _fucking androids_. Or, more aptly, fucking one android in particular.

Not that Hank would ever admit it, of course, but Gavin knows. He’s observant like that, though he can’t give Hank shit for it unless he wants another strike on his disciplinary record, which is something he really can’t afford right now.

After Hank leaves, Gavin goes back to swiveling. He hates how much he thinks about that fucking robot. He’d done the same thing with Connor, back when he first showed up, but this is different. Connor was always meant to be Hank’s. He wasn’t Gavin’s concern in the slightest – he was just something to antagonize, a way to pass the time. That sort of shit wasn’t a crime, back then. But now there’s _another_ one, just like Connor but far, far worse. Imposing where Connor is gentle, harsh where Connor is soft. Instead of those brown doe eyes there’s _ice,_ and for all Connor’s goofy personality there is nothing. It’s like trying to work with Windows XP on legs, except that he’s faster, stronger, and could probably snap Gavin’s neck under his shoe.

Which, you know, should probably upset Gavin more than it does.

Gavin flicks his pen across the desk, right at the place RK900 would usually sit. He doesn’t want to think about the RK900, or his shoes, or his distinctive lack of personality, or those fucking glacial eyes. He doesn’t want to think about any of it. What he _does_ want is for Fowler to give him some grisly case to take his mind off things before he gets back into bad habits.

It is at that precise moment RK900 returns, files in hand. The bastard still wears his CyberLife uniform even though he’s supposedly a deviant, though Gavin supposes he hasn’t got the same baggage with CyberLife as other androids do. It doesn’t really help with the whole integrating-into-society thing, though. Not that RK900 seems to care that much.

RK900 looks pointedly at Gavin’s feet. Gavin pointedly does not move them.

“What’re you looking at, toaster?”

RK900 ignores the question and instead places the files down on Gavin’s desk. “We have a new case, suspected to be linked to red ice.”

That gets Gavin’s feet off the desk, all right. “My fairy fuckin’ godmother. Red ice? Why’re they assigning that shit to us?”

The question is a rhetorical one; RK900 is already getting better at detecting those. He answers it anyway. “According to DPD records, Lieutenant Anderson would be best suited to the case, given his previous experience.” He pauses, then, his LED flickering yellow for less than a moment – it’s so brief that Gavin almost doesn’t catch it. “Captain Fowler believed it should be assigned to us.”

Gavin flips open the file and begins to card through it. Yeah, Hank’s hang-ups with red ice are another one of those badly-kept secrets that everybody knows and nobody talks about. The whole thing was kind of ironic – Hank was known best for his work on red ice, and yet it was the very same thing that ruined his life. Didn’t seem fair, really, that someone who did so much good could be punished like that. Gavin tried not to think too hard about it. He’s no stranger to the stuff, either, so he isn’t entirely surprised that they’d been assigned the case. Fowler probably wants to cut Anderson a break after the whole deviant shtick.

Sighing, Gavin flips the file shut and leans back dangerously far in his chair. He takes a moment to observe RK900. “You always stand so fucking still?”

“I have not quite gotten a handle on human posturing,” RK900 offers. “I did not intend to make you uncomfortable, Detective.”

The shit meant it as an insult. Gavin _knows_ he did. He pushes out of his chair and snatches up the file. “We might as well go now, then. Get this shit over with.”

RK900 doesn’t complain.

There’s always been something about the red ice cases that makes Gavin’s skin crawl. It makes him wonder how Hank could stomach that kind of shit for as long as he did. Drugs complicate things, sure, but red ice is fucking insidious. It hits differently to the other stuff and Gavin has never been entirely sure why. Even so, he can’t deny the thrill these cases bring him, so entirely unlike anything else.

That thrill is decidedly dampened by the robot in his car. RK900 sits terribly still, hands fisted on his knees, his back just a little too straight. It’s distracting and Gavin wishes he’d made the thing walk instead, or maybe put it in the trunk. Tied it to the fucking roof, even. The car is filled with a tension that even the radio can’t diffuse.

“Tell me what we know so far,” Gavin demands. He doesn’t take his eyes off the road. God, anything – _anything_ to break the fucking silence.

“The victim was an android. Model DL400, initially designed as a childcare assistant, date of deviation unknown. She lived alone in a studio apartment on the ground floor of her apartment complex. She was unemployed at the time of her deactivation. Currently there are no likely suspects.”

 _Deactivation._ The fine hairs on the back of Gavin’s arms prickle. “How’d she die?” He already knows, of course – but he wants RK900 to say it. Wants to see if he squirms.

“She was trussed from the ceiling and gutted.”

Gavin sucks his teeth and thinks back to when he was a teenager and true crime podcasts had been all the rage. He remembers the ones he’d listened to, the infamous ones, the tales of women hung and dressed like game in some bastard’s barn. This case perturbs him just like those stories had all those years ago. RK900, of course, doesn’t seem fazed in the slightest.

“Thanks, Siri.”

RK900’s LED flashes yellow for a beat before they once more settle into silence.

They arrive soon after, pulling up outside a modestly sized apartment complex a few clicks out of town. The street is cordoned off and lit with the flashing lights of police cruisers, and Gavin can see anxious faces peering from the apartment windows.

“Why is it always so fucking _dark_ when I get called out?” Gavin demands of nobody in particular, wrapping himself tightly in his coat as he gets out of the car. It isn’t fall yet, not really, but the nights have grown brisk and Detroit is forecast to have one of the coldest winters on record.

“We just like pissing you off.”

Gavin turns and huffs out a sigh, his retort falling flat when he sees Tina pick her way onto the sidewalk. “Yeah, figures.”

“Hey, RK,” she says to RK900. “Hope our old sourpuss isn’t giving you too much trouble.”

“Nothing out of the ordinary, Officer Chen.”

Gavin rolls his eyes and Tina laughs.

She shows them into the building, pressing past the other personnel until they reach the door to the victim’s apartment. It’s a small studio with no bed and no kitchenware, though it’s clear that the android had tried to make it as much of a home as she could. It makes the sight of her corpse even sadder. Hung by her feet from the ceiling with her stomach panel gaping wide open, wires yanked out and strewn across the floor.

“Well, shit,” Gavin says. RK900 doesn’t say anything.

They spend a few moments in contemplative silence, taking in the scene. It doesn’t strike Gavin the same way murders usually do – if this was a human woman, it would be different. But it isn’t. Gavin surveys the body, the gaping opening in her chassis, the way the remains of her skin have begun to pixelate just like a human would begin to bloat. _Android decomposition_ , he thinks, fascinated. One of her arms is partially disconnected at the shoulder, hanging on by a few thick, fibrous cords. Thirium has soaked through her clothes, all down her front, framing the stark white glow of her face from behind the forest of wires hanging from her belly.

And her eyes. Christ, her eyes, wide open and lifeless like a fucking blue screen. Terror frozen in the last moments before she shut down, suspended there forever. He stares at that face for far longer than he needs to. Without breaking his gaze, Gavin fishes his pack of cigarettes out of his coat. “I’m going for a smoke. Do that weird analysis shit or whatever it is you bots do – just don’t fuck anything up.”

Naturally, RK900 lingers behind. He takes samples, stores evidence, constructs possible scenarios. Inspects the corpse more closely, peers into the stomach panel to assess the full extent of the damage. In the end, he suspects that he and Gavin have drawn similar conclusions, and when he’s satisfied with his coverage he elects to join Gavin outside. It’s a moment before he sees him; Gavin leans against the wall staring into space, cigarette between his teeth, almost completely shrouded in darkness. He spares little more than a glance as RK900 approaches.

“Red ice is made of thirium,” RK900 says. “Her body was drained of it.”

Gavin made an obnoxious dinging noise from around his cigarette. “Bingo.”

“Her thirium was harvested, then, presumably for cooking red ice. I was unable to find any suspects on the database, however – it appears she didn’t have many friends.”

“She had no friends,” Gavin corrects him, exhaling smoke through his nose. “Mental health was shit as far as androids go. The only people she ever really visited were the kids she used to care for before she deviated.”

RK900’s LED pulses yellow. “How do you know that? It isn’t on the –,”

“What, did you think I just sat around out here shooting the shit while you were in there licking blood?” Gavin grins, then, and there’s something very feral about it, but also very charming. “I’m a detective for a reason, tin man.” He pushes away from the wall and drops his cigarette onto the concrete, grinding it beneath his shoe. “I’m done. Let me know when you’ve… done whatever freaky robot shit you need to do or whatever.”

There is little else for RK900 to do, either, and so they leave the scene soon after. Gavin never likes to linger, and the scene makes him feel strangely melancholy. Maybe it’s the sight of the potted plants on the windowsill; the attempt at making a life only to have it violently snuffed out. A headache is already starting to form behind Gavin’s eyes, and he pulls off the route back to the station to take a labyrinth of back streets. He pulls in to the gutter and parks, the motions jerky and awkward.

“Where are you going?” RK900 demands when Gavin opens his door and makes to get out. He’d noticed the detective’s demeanor change as they drove, but had elected to do nothing, interested to see where it led.

“I’m getting a drink. Stay in the fucking car until I’m done, or – walk home. I don’t fucking care.”

RK900 watches, perplexed, as Gavin ambles across the street towards what’s less of a bar and more of a hole in the wall. He had detected an increase in Gavin’s stress upon viewing the android, but that was to be expected. As he watches Gavin shoulder his way through the door, RK900 considers Hank Anderson’s alcoholism, and wonders if Gavin gave over to the same vices in times of stress. It seems to be a very common thing in humans, and given the effect of alcohol on human physiology, it isn’t any mystery as to why. RK900 knows they should return to the station and begin work on the case – or at least file a report – but something keeps him seated and still. Gavin Reed may be unsavory and difficult, but he is human.

RK900 will allow him this.

The bar is just as shitty as Gavin remembers. Thank God. He doesn’t think he could handle anything better – he needs gritty. He needs dark, he needs _bad_. He hasn’t been to this joint in over a year. Doesn’t like showing his face too often, especially in places like this. But sometimes – like now – it’s what he needs.

He orders a shot of tequila and allows the tension in his neck to diffuse into the dim light and low voices. He tries not to think about those fucking plants. The bartender doesn’t try to make conversation, which Gavin is thankful for. He needs something to take his mind off things. Something stronger than a few shots of low-shelf booze.

“Haven’t seen you around here before.”

Gavin glances towards the voice, his shot glass half-raised to his lips. There’s a guy leaning against the bar, hip jutting out with the kind of cockiness Gavin usually can’t stand. He throws back the shot before replying, motioning for a refill.

“Yeah, I don’t come around here often. Don’t usually have the time.”

The man smiles at him, showing a slip of teeth. He’s tall and decently built, swarthy in a way Gavin likes. He can’t stand pretty boys, can’t stand twinks, can’t stand anybody gentle. He was raised on a rough edge and anything else is no fucking good. He glances at the man’s hands – they’re broad, rough, and dark with tattoos. Yeah. He’ll do nicely.

The guy sidles closer and Gavin knows he has him bagged. He takes the lime and saltshaker from the bar, laying the salt across the back of his tattooed hand. Gavin takes it and drags his tongue across the knuckles, does the shot, and feels the press of fingers at his lips. He takes them in eagerly, groaning around the lime they bring with them.

The guy laughs. What’s his name? Not that Gavin particularly cares. He’ll probably forget it in an hour or two anyway. It doesn’t matter, though, not when his belly is warm with tequila and there’s a tongue in his mouth, hands firm on his waist.

“Let’s fuck,” he rasps against the guy’s mouth. He’s rewarded with a laugh and thanks fuck he always keeps rubbers in his wallet.

“You’re an eager one,” the other man murmurs, one hand firm on Gavin’s throat. He likes that. He likes that a _lot_. His dick is already reacting.

Just as Gavin is about to reply, though, he’s met with a rush of cold air as the man is wrenched away from him. “What the fuck? Hey –,”

It’s like some kind of fucking nightmare. There he was, cozying up to some dude at a bar, and then the fucking _Terminator_ shows up with those flinty eyes and inexpressive face and destroys all hope he had of getting laid.

“Get the fuck out!” Gavin barks, as annoyed as he is embarrassed. He shoves RK900 with more force than necessary, forgetting that he isn’t human. It’s like pushing a brick wall for all the difference it makes.

But RK900 isn’t paying attention to him. His gaze is fixed on the other man, who’s sneering and bristling like a threatened animal. “Bold of you coming in here, android,” the man spits. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave right the fuck now.” His voice is low, threatening violence, and it makes Gavin’s gut twist.

RK900 doesn’t even blink. “If you know what is good for you,” he replies in almost perfect mimicry, “you will leave me and my partner alone.”

Of course it’s interpreted wrongly. Of fucking course it is. The man lets out a scathing laugh before he throws a punch, and RK900 catches his fist in one of his hands without so much as flinching. He squeezes and Gavin can practically hear the guy’s knuckles creak under the pressure.

“I will not warn you again.”

The guy backs off, then, finally understanding that he’s out of his depth. Doesn’t stop him from spitting in RK900’s face, though, nor from shooting Gavin a look so disgusting that it makes him shiver. It’s the same kind of look Gavin used to give anyone suspected of being an _android fucker._ RK900 grips his arm and half-carries him towards the door.

“Let go of me, you asshole!” Gavin protests, shoving at RK900 like it’ll make a difference. RK900 drags him out of the bar anyway. He doesn’t let up until they’re across the road, where RK900 releases him with such force that he’s practically thrown against the door. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

RK900’s eyes seem to glow. It’s disconcerting, and Gavin can’t be sure if it’s just a trick of the light or not. His face is tight, unimpressed, and if Gavin didn’t know better he’d say he’s _frowning._

“I was prepared to allow you to drink,” RK900 says stiffly. “Not to have sex with strangers.”

Gavin’s ears burn. The fucking _gall_ of this guy – ! “What I do with strangers is none of your fucking business!” He’s right there in RK900’s face, goading him, because he’s so angry that it’s easy to forget that RK900 could incapacitate him in three seconds flat. When RK900 doesn’t react, however, Gavin deflates and steps back. He feels even worse than before, angry and humiliated and – _bad_. He spits into the gutter and reflexively begins to feel around for a cigarette. “Just get in the fucking car.”

* * *

Gavin has always been a workaholic. His buddies used to tease him about it, back when he had buddies. He has a tendency to hyperfixate on things – he won’t eat, won’t sleep, won’t even piss until the job is done. Even now, well into adulthood, he still hasn’t managed to shake that habit. Red ice cases do that to him.

It helps having a walking computer, as much as Gavin is loath to admit it. RK900 can crunch numbers and run queries and correlate data like nobody’s business, and it makes Gavin’s job a whole lot easier. It’s little comfort when they have no leads, which is the unfortunate reality of the DL400 case. The girl’s lack of contacts makes things difficult.

“The logical first step would be to talk to the family she was employed by prior to deviation,” RK900 suggests.

Gavin grunts and doesn’t look up from his terminal.

Just when RK900 thinks he’s making inroads to deciphering Gavin Reed, he’s thrown for a loop. Like now. Like at the bar. Gavin heads in one direction before veering unexpectedly off course, and yet he does so with such utter determination that it never feels like an accident. RK900 isn’t quite sure what to make of it, and coupled with Gavin’s inexhaustible hostility, it’s becoming… difficult.

But that is a problem for later.

The next few days are spent organizing data and evidence and trying to connect various points of interest. They organize to speak to the android’s previous family, who seem saddened by the death. Gavin takes it as a good sign, but RK900 isn’t so sure. Again, they are engulfed by a silence that RK900 knows to be unnatural – he has one of the most advanced social modules on the market, and yet he remains tentative in the face of so many unknown variables. There are options to select different personality facets based on certain archetypes, but he doesn’t want that, even though it would probably make his job easier. He wants to develop his own, but to do that he has to _learn_ , and learning takes time, even for androids.

He wonders how Gavin ended up with his personality. What events had shaped it. Skirting around that idea feels oddly invasive, so RK900 tries to push it out of his mind and think about the case instead.

Thankfully, they arrive at the Reynolds residence before RK900 can dwell any longer. It’s a pleasant sort of house with two stories and a large bay window. Entirely respectable. Gavin and RK900 share a look over the roof of the car.

“Don’t do anything weird,” Gavin mutters as they approach the door. The woman who meets them is tall and willow-thin, the lines on her face preserved gracefully. They seem deeper with grief, and her hesitation is clear when she opens the door to see Gavin and RK900 standing there. Gavin, at least, isn’t surprised by it; neither he nor RK900 are particularly approachable.

“Mrs. Reynolds? I’m Detective Reed, Detroit Police. I talked to you on the phone the other day.” Gavin holds out his hand and she stares at it as if she hasn’t heard him. Then she startles, shaking his hand briefly and offering them a smile.

“Yes, of course.” She ushers them inside, and the interior of the house is just as neatly kept as the outside. A respectable family of respectable caliber – definitely the sort of family who would own a childcare android. The way Mrs. Reynolds carries herself speaks of a high-flier, and on their way to the living room Gavin spots an array of university certificates hung on the wall. He doesn’t have time to inspect them properly, but there’s a good number of degrees in her name.

Gavin feels a bit out of place sitting on Mrs. Reynolds’s sofa. The whole place is spotless and perfectly middle-class, like something right out of _American Beauty_. Mrs. Reynolds offers them tea, but they both decline. RK900 doesn’t give anything away at all.

“Dana was always so kind,” she begins without prompting. “The kids loved her, even after she – you know –,”

“Deviated.”

Gavin glances across at RK900, surprised to hear him speak. Mrs. Reynolds seems a little startled, too, but the presence of another android seems to give her confidence, and she nods.

“Yes. We kept in contact after she moved away, but she became distant. We figured she was moving on with her life, but…” she gestures vaguely. “I guess not.”

“She was trying,” Gavin offers, doing his best to come off as sympathetic, which was never an easy thing for him. “You said she was kind – it’d be helpful if we had some testament to her personality, both before and after her deviation.”

Mrs. Reynolds is more than happy to help them. She tells them all about the android – Dana – both during her time in their service and her life after the revolution. Gavin doesn’t bother taking notes; RK900 is recording it all anyway. Instead he listens, watching the woman’s face carefully, her gestures. She comes across as genuine.

“Could we speak to your kids?” he asks. “Alone, preferably – there might be things they don’t want to say in front of their mom.”

Mrs. Reynolds looks suitably uncomfortable with the idea of leaving her children alone with the police, but she cooperates easier than most. The kids – brother and sister – are about eleven, with their mother’s stormy grey eyes and lopsided mouth. It all goes much the way Gavin expected it would, and they’re out of the house within two hours.

As they stand on the sidewalk, Gavin stops and stares hard up at the second floor window, his face scrunched up in a way RK900 hasn’t seen before.

“Is something wrong, Detective?”

Gavin doesn’t reply right away. “Yeah,” he says eventually, turning back to his car. “I’m good. Let’s get out of here.”

The drive, again, is silent. RK900 rolls the data over and over, cutting and cropping their interview. His LED blinks yellow as he works and he finds himself itching for something with which he can occupy his hands, to match motor to mind.

He spies a few forgotten coins at the bottom of Gavin’s cup holder. Reaching down, he picks up a quarter, and something hidden in his programming clicks.

“Oh, fuck, not you too!” Gavin bites out when he looks over, distracted by the flash of the coin as RK900 begins to flip it over his knuckles. “Cut that shit out.”

RK900 disregards that. “The android we viewed,” he says by way of reply, continuing to flip the coin. “While you were talking to the others, I looked into her internal cavity. Her inner circuitry was removed in order to access the thirium valve behind it.”

“Yeah,” Gavin responds. The word is long and drawn out. “I read the autopsy report.”

“Congratulations, Detective. You will know, then, that the valve was cut clean through and was used to drain the android’s thirium. It was an efficient method of harvesting it – it minimized wastage.”

Finally, Gavin glanced away from the road. “Yeah. And?”

“The material of an android’s thirium valve is virtually impossible to shear through without specialized tools. While it isn’t impossible to achieve the same end with more conventional equipment, I feel that the cut was too clean to specify otherwise. The sort of tool involved is not available to the public.”

Gavin pauses. “You think it was someone from CyberLife?”

“Either that, or the tools were stolen.”

The silence that befalls them after that isn’t awkward. It’s contemplative. Neither of them speak again until they’re back at the station, Gavin vaulting out of the car and heading in out of the wind without bothering to wait for his partner. RK900 follows, interest piqued by the sudden flare of the detective’s actions – they possess a new sort of purpose that RK900 hasn’t seen before. When Gavin turns and RK900 is able to see his face, he finds a feral determination written upon it, like the eyes of a dog on a scent.

He’s not the only one that notices. Anderson, who’d been watching them curiously since Gavin barreled into the bullpen, leans back in his chair with a belly-deep chuckle. “What’d you do to light the fire under his ass?” he asks RK900.

“Fuck off, Anderson,” Gavin calls without looking up from his terminal.

“I did nothing, Lieutenant,” RK900 says. “It would appear that Detective Reed is… on a scent.”

Gavin does look up, then, glaring over the top of his terminal at RK900. “You gonna help me out or sit around gossiping?”

Anderson chuckles again, but returns his attention to his own work.

RK900 goes through the paces, of course. They crunch numbers and sort data, sifting through CyberLife’s employee records and any local robberies. It’s a long shot, but it makes sense, and Gavin seems willing to follow it even if it made things difficult. And yet despite his growing attachment to this case, RK900 can’t help but remember Gavin’s stint at that bar, how he’d spotted suspicious behaviour even from such a distance. For some reason the memory of it refuses to be pushed away, ambling around the forefront of his mind. The smell of Gavin’s fury still lingers.


	3. III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> would you believe me if i told you this was only ever meant to be a oneshot

RK900’s apartment is small and bare. While Jericho had made little progress in securing any major rights for deviants, they had pressured CyberLife into providing housing for deviants who wished to navigate the world on their own – some managed to fund their own rents, but many androids struggled to do so, and a number of poignant media releases were made that bottlenecked CyberLife into action.

RK900 doesn’t mind it, though. He doesn’t require sleep or food, and even exposure doesn’t affect androids the same way it would affect a human, but it’s nice to have his own space. He hasn’t decorated it – he hasn’t even bought furniture. The only time he spends there is to charge, after all. He never has visitors. There is no need.

And yet, despite all reasoning to the contrary, it’s lonely. He stands alone in the dark and the silence is strange after so long surrounded by noise. He can hear the hum of his internal systems, of the heating vents and the faint thrum of power running through the walls. He wonders if Gavin’s home is bare, or if it’s cluttered, if he has pets or potted plants like that murdered android did. He wonders if Gavin is there now, or if he’s somewhere else, skulking through the dark or sat at a bar like –

RK900 wills all thoughts of Gavin Reed away as he prepared himself for stasis. He has a number of diagnostics to run – relatively simple system checks and the like. That blank, white space that awaits him feels like a relief. He never thinks there. He doesn’t have to. All he must do is exist – and that is enough for now.

* * *

It’s bothering him. It’s bothering him more than it should, more than it has any right to. Gavin can’t chew his way through this one. He can’t drink his way through it. No amount of benzos will make it go away, either, and even if they can stupefy him for a bit, he knows the problem will still be there in the morning. So he doesn’t bother.

 _Fuckin’ androids_ , Hank used to say. Gavin wishes he was still spouting that same old anti-android bullshit, but it’s a pipe dream. Connor – fucking _Connor_ – had managed to seduce him over to the dark side with those big fucking eyes and tight little waist. Gavin thinks about all the times he’s caught Hank staring all dopey-eyed at Connor and wonders what the fuck went wrong. Only a year ago things were okay, and now he’s at risk of being put out of a job by a hunk of scrap metal.

He doesn’t even bother going home after leaving the station. His cat will be fine; she has enough food and water for a few more hours. He just needs a drink. Or ten.

The bar he goes to is far enough away for him to feel safe. It’s far enough away for him not to be recognized, which is important when you’re a cop who’s out doing things cops definitely shouldn’t be doing. But Gavin’s never been a _good_ cop. He’s never been a particularly good person in the first place, so he doesn’t care, not really. It’s a half-lit little dive between a Vietnamese food place and a closed-down charity store in some back-alley in a part of town he only vaguely remembers. The girl behind the bar barely looks old enough to work there, but her eyes are flinty and Gavin doesn’t really feel up to messing with her. Not tonight, anyway. He orders a vodka soda and tries to focus on the sour smell wafting up from the bar mat.

The girl keeps her eye on him; he can’t tell if she’s wary or concerned. Maybe both. He looks like shit, sure, but he usually looks like shit, and she’s probably seen worse. He finishes his first drink, then his second. Glancing up, Gavin surveys the room. It’s difficult to see, and shadows crowd the corners, but he eventually catches sight of a man standing against the far wall nursing a beer against his belly. Their eyes meet and Gavin’s tongue presses against the back of his teeth. Tall and broad and the wrong side of middle-aged; Gavin immediately knows they bat for the same team, merely from the look the man gives him. He’s not the kind of guy Gavin would usually go for, but beggars can’t be choosers.

He knows how to make himself look available; if Gavin Reed is good at anything, it’s body language. He’s fluent in a language many people aren’t even aware of, can have conversations without opening his mouth. It’s part of being a cop, he thinks, and part of why he’s so good at the job. The man eyes him up and down and the thirst Gavin sees there is thrilling. Always is, being looked at like that. Like he’s wanted, even if it’s all superficial. It’s enough to work him through a few more drinks – enough that he starts to really feel it.

Tina would kick his ass if she knew.

But Tina – well, Tina isn’t here right now. It’s just him and the man across the bar who hasn’t lifted his eyes from Gavin’s. As he begins the slow crawl across the room, Gavin’s belly shivers and twists up behind his lungs. The sensation isn’t unpleasant, but it’s fearful, which is almost as bad. He tries his best to swallow it down, and the alcohol eases it a bit. Now isn’t the time to chicken out.

The man takes a swig of his beer just as Gavin comes within earshot. Smiles low and wide, a laugh rumbling up through him; Gavin sees it rather than hears it. “Straight to the point, huh?”

Gavin shifts his weight, coming to a stop just close enough to smell the faint traces of aftershave. He can’t help the sneer that prickles along his mouth. “I don’t like wasting time,” he bites out. “I can go find some other bastard –,”

Shit like that always works. People like Gavin are love-or-hate – he’ll either get fucked or get beat up, maybe both. He’s fine with it either way. A large hand fists in his shirt, right near the collar, and before he can so much as draw a breath he’s being dragged back towards the side exit. His cock jumps against his fly.

Then, just like that, his cheek is crushed against the brickwork outside, dewy with night air. One hand holds his head there, a finger digging painfully against his nose, and the other works at his belt buckle. _Thank fuck_. He wriggles a bit to try and help the process along, and finally his jeans are shoved down his thighs just enough for the stranger’s hand to slot between his legs. Gavin’s already nearing full-hardness, shame making his guts tighten. The endorphins are rushing already. The fear – the humiliation of it all – makes it _bite_.

“Knew you were a slut the second I laid eyes on you,” the stranger chuckles, and his voice is low and sort of raspy in a way that makes Gavin shiver. He doesn’t wait for a response; he wasn’t angling for one in the first place. He rubs his knuckles across Gavin’s balls, squeezes them just a little too roughly, and laughs again when Gavin makes a shameful little noise in response. Then he’s jerking forward against the wall as the rough pad of the stranger’s thumb presses against his hole. “You got lube?”

Gavin’s hands are tingling. “No,” he rasps, glancing back over his shoulder and angling his hips out further, right into the stranger’s hand.

“Condom?”

“No – fuck, c’mon –,”

Going raw tends to be a dealbreaker these days – sex ed is too good, protection too widely available, and Gavin is usually sensible enough to err on the side of caution. But not like this. Not now. He needs this – he deserves it.

“Fucking freak.” There’s no heat behind it, not really, but it still makes Gavin’s neck flush hot with shame. The thumb pushes in dry and Gavin hisses; he’s only vaguely aware of the glob of spit that lands on his hole, too preoccupied with sinking deeper and deeper into the feel of it. A zipper is pulled and he feels the warm kiss of flesh against his thigh. His hole aches, his fucked-up psyche more thirsty for pain than anything else in the world.

It never comes, though.

Instead of the burning press of a cock against his hole, Gavin is instead treated to a sudden rush of cold air and… nothing. The hand is gone from his ass, the pressure gone from his head. It takes him a few rapid blinks to regain his bearings, and he half-turns to find the stranger with his dick out, held at the end of a long arm that –

Oh fuck. Oh _fuck._ It’s the RK900, standing _right fucking there_ like someone just shit on his shoe.

“What the fuck? What –,” the man’s fury is tempered by confusion, like he isn’t sure whether he should throw a punch or not.

“This is your only warning,” comes the smooth interjection. The edges of Gavin’s vision begin to pulse. “Leave now, or I will be forced to remove you from the premises myself.”

The man, at least, has sense enough to leave. He also has the sense _not_ to aim an uppercut at the RK900’s jaw. Gavin, it appears, is not that sensible.

“You fucking – !” He throws the punch and isn’t entirely surprised when the RK900 catches it, his hand like fucking steel. His expression shifts only a little; his brow tightens the smallest amount, mouth growing firm in the same way a parent’s does when lecturing a child. “You prick! You can’t just fucking waltz in and – what the fuck was that even for?!” He has so much to say that it all comes out garbled, words fused together by anger. The RK900 doesn’t let go of his fist.

“This is not the place for conversation,” RK900 says in that same infuriatingly smooth way. “Also, I would advise you fix your clothing. You look ridiculous.”

Gavin is again flooded with shame, and although it’s the not-so-pleasant kind, he can’t ignore the way his dick twitches in response. Grumbling, he sets about fixing his jeans, RK900 finally releasing his hand and standing there as awkwardly as a whore in a church. When he’s done, RK900 wastes no time in seizing him by the back of his jacket and half-dragging him back towards the street. Furious, Gavin attempts to throw him off. It doesn’t work.

“The fuck are you playing at? Get the fuck – get _off_ me!” Finally, RK900 relents and lets Gavin go as they reach the curb. His gaze remains level and Gavin tries his best not to shrink under the weight of it, but it’s immensely difficult to maintain his dignity when he’s standing there out of breath and with a half-hard dick. “What’s your problem?”

“You were attempting to partake in a dangerous activity. Also, your blood alcohol level is too high to warrant the act as consensual.”

Gavin very nearly spits at him. “Fuck you! What I do off the clock’s none of your business, you fucking glorified toaster.” Shit. His fucking dick is still hard. Anger and lust produce the same heat and his booze-skewed brain seems to think they’re one in the same. He’s painfully hard in his jeans and it’s making his head spin. RK900 – the bastard – doesn’t deign to reply.

Just as Gavin’s planning his next move, however, a cab pulls up to the curb. RK900’s hand is in his jacket again, yanking Gavin toward the street despite his croak of protest. The booze has settled too deep – he doesn’t put up much of a fight.

“You kidnapping me?” he spits as RK900 enters the taxi and interfaces. The door slides shut and, quite suddenly, they’re alone.

“I am taking you home.”

“You know my address? Are you stalking me?”

RK900 glances at him as the cab lurches forward, regards him like he isn’t worth the effort. “Your address is on the database,” he says like Gavin has the intellect of a newborn. “It took less than a second to locate.”

But Gavin is only half paying attention, because all his blood seems to be circulating _down_ instead of where it needs to go, which is his brain – each time RK900 _looks_ at him like that, down the slant of his perfect fucking nose, Gavin’s entire body throbs. Every yank against his jacket. He tries to think of anything to ease the downward slide of his thoughts – algebra, saggy old ladies, _anything_ – but it doesn’t work. His breath comes jagged and short, and even though he turns his eyes away he can still feel the weight of that flinty gaze on him. RK900’s apparent disinterest – disgust, even – somehow makes it even worse.

“Are you hurt, detective?”

“You fuckin’ blue-balled me,” Gavin grouses. “This is your fucking fault.”

For a moment RK900 is quiet. Then he moves so suddenly that Gavin barely has time to react, and when those terminator-strong hands move to pull at his jeans the only thing he can do is squawk in surprise.

Every single thought evacuates his brain at the rasp of his underwear against his dick. RK900 leans over him and his eyes seem to _glow_ , bright and cold, and any strength that Gavin has left melts away. RK900’s grip is deliciously firm and Gavin’s dick likes that _very much_. Gavin swallows a groan and turns his face into his shoulder.

The silence might be awkward in another circumstance, but Gavin’s brain feels like it’s malfunctioning at the deepest level, so it doesn’t really matter. What _does_ matter is the constant yellow flicker of RK900’s LED and the way his fingers press down between Gavin’s legs. They’re wet, somehow, slippery as they press over his hole. The angle is uncomfortable, what with Gavin half-crumpled against the seat and RK900 between his legs, towering over him like some sort of sexual nightmare, but he doesn’t care. Can’t care, not with the way RK900 slips his forefinger inside and curls it, rubbing the pad of his finger against Gavin’s prostate like he knows _exactly_ where it is. Gavin’s hips jerk up and he swears, loudly, though the sound comes out more like a choked-off sob. His hands fumble for purchase on RK900’s arms. A second finger slips in beside the first and Gavin is _trembling_.

“Fuck,” he wheezes out; RK900’s fingers begin to move, fucking in and out with such precision that it’s almost painful, each slick twist hitting him like a punch square to the side of his head. Gavin’s jaw goes slack as RK900’s other hand comes to wrap around his dick, giving a few firm strokes.

“Come, Gavin.” It is said without inflection, without emotion. Humiliation sets deep and delicious in Gavin’s bones.

He comes, though. Just like that. He comes violently, his hips shuddering and jerking, and if it wasn’t for RK900’s hold on him he probably would have thrown himself from the seat of the cab and onto the floor. He comes and comes and _comes_ , and the last thing he sees before passing out completely are those two moon-bright eyes.

Gavin wakes up the next morning with a completely expected hangover. He’s had worse, sure, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling like shit. When he is first roused from sleep he can’t breathe but, thankfully, that’s not from his drinking – it’s from a great yowling cat sitting on his head. Not the best way to come to terms with a hangover, that’s for sure.

He tries not to think about things as he drags himself out of bed, his eldritch horror of a cat leading him to the cat dishes by the sink. Tries not to think as he feeds said eldritch horror, as he takes a shower and has a meagre breakfast of a few dry crackers. Because – of fucking _course_ – he remembers everything. Drunk enough for a hangover but not drunk enough for a blackout. Typical.

Briefly, Gavin considers calling in sick. The more he wakes up and the more reality sets in, the worse the prospect of facing the RK900 becomes. His memories, while intact, are hazy. Except those fucking eyes. They’re sharp enough for Gavin to cut himself on. To make him rub one out in the shower and wallow in shame for the next half-hour before he manages to convince himself he isn’t a coward.

And skiving off work is a coward’s move.

He rolls up to the precinct only an hour late, pointedly ignoring every greeting thrown his way. He dreads the moment he has to lay eyes on RK900, on those perfect fucking could-definitely-snap-your-neck hands, and he keys himself up to such a degree that he stops dead on the spot when he finds RK900 very definitely _not_ at his desk. Where he always is, without fail, every goddamn morning.

He knows Connor is watching him without turning around. He nearly flips him off, but decides against it, instead moseying across the bullpen and throwing himself into his chair.

There’s a fucking coffee on his desk, right in the middle of it, innocuous and yet entirely threatening; Gavin belatedly spots the box of aspirin next to it, and his stomach shrivels.

 _Fucking bastard_ , he thinks. His dick twitches anyway.

Connor’s still fucking watching him – for all his high-end genius, the kid’s shit at pretending not to stare. It makes Gavin wonder if he knows something. Or if RK900 had _told_ him something, which is infinitely worse.

He gulps the coffee down in a few swallows. Black and saturated with sugar – the only way he takes it. He’d never mentioned it to anyone, but of course RK900 knew. Of fucking course he did.

RK900 shows up eventually, just as Gavin knew he would. He doesn’t say anything as he strides into the bullpen or as he takes his place at his desk. He isn’t afraid of making eye contact, though, and Gavin comes to the quick conclusion that this is RK900’s weird way of being polite. The knowledge sits weirdly in his brain, itching like it doesn’t belong there.

“I thought it would be best if I made myself scarce,” RK900 explains as Gavin slam-dunks his coffee cup into the trash bin. “At least until I could get a read on your temperament.”

 _That’s all you have to say after you fingerblasted me in a fucking cab?!_ Gavin wants to say, but he doesn’t, because they’re at work and he _knows_ Connor is listening, the little fuck.

Instead, he says nothing. He ignores RK900 completely, because even though Gavin Reed isn’t a coward, he’s a pro at avoiding his problems. He also doesn’t want to give RK900 the satisfaction.

He spends the rest of the day doing paperwork that had been piling up ever since Markus did his little android-Jesus thing and plunged the DPD into an administrative nightmare. He leaves RK900 to do whatever super-robot detective shit he needs to – hell, RK900 could probably solve this case on his own anyway. Gavin wallows in his hangover and his humiliation until he finally punches out. He leaves work without having said a single word to RK900 the entire day.

The shower he takes that night is cold.


	4. IV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took so long kajsndkjnsdfk im moving house rn and its. a lot.

RK900 is troubled. _Troubled_ – it’s such a human thing to be, and while his predecessor might take delight in feeling things the same way humans might, RK900 does not. He doesn’t like it. It’s an uncomfortable knot of code that sits deep in his programming. He can’t untangle it. He can’t purge it. It’s just… stuck there, and for the first time in his (admittedly short) life, he doesn’t know what to do about it.

“You have been frowning a lot,” Connor observes. He had found RK900 in the break room when he went to make Anderson a cup of coffee; RK900 was standing and staring at the wall, his LED beating a constant yellow as he tried to diagnose himself with… something. “Something on your mind?”

RK900 turns to look at him. Considers. Gavin would react negatively if he were to tell Connor about their exchange the other night. “I am troubled.”

Connor’s eyebrows perk with interest.

“Detective Reed and I – we – I believe I may have done something he did not like. I am unsure how to get into his good graces.” Even the words are uncomfortable. No, he doesn’t like this at all.

Connor hums like he understands it. “I felt like that a lot when I first started working with Lieutenant Anderson,” he says as the coffee machine whirs to life between them. “I did a lot of things he didn’t like before – back then.” There’s a blink of yellow there, so brief that RK900 almost doesn’t catch it; Connor is reliving memories he finds somewhat distressing, it seems. RK900 doesn’t have that many memories with which to compare, but he can empathize to some degree – seeing the detective crowded against that wall isn’t something he likes to revisit. “But we sorted it out,” Connor continues, smiling. “Humans are strange. Different.” He pauses. “Individual.”

“What do you suggest, then?”

There’s a bubble of static in Connor’s voice that sounds suspiciously like a laugh. “I _would_ say you should talk to him, but Detective Reed isn’t a man of many words, so to speak. If I had to suggest anything, it would be to anticipate what he needs and meet it.” He shrugs, takes the coffee, and turns to leave with a reassuring pat to RK900’s shoulder. “Good luck!”

And then he leaves, and RK900 feels no closer to a solution than he was before.

Gavin continues to give him the cold shoulder for the next few days. Connor was right in saying that Gavin isn’t a man of many words – he is a specific kind of idiot, RK900 concludes, who prefers to settle things with his fists. His disciplinary record shows as much, and Gavin seems more than happy to put their investigation on hold purely so he can ignore RK900. At first it was fine – RK900 didn’t mind being ignored, and not having Gavin mouthing off all day was rather nice. But then their work began to suffer, and RK900 knew he had to do something about it.

The RK900 model was made to be the best of the best. He won’t sacrifice his performance because of some bull-headed human whose priority is to make his life difficult.

He thinks about what Connor had said that day in the break room. _Anticipates what he needs and meet it._ Gavin is acting out for a reason – RK900 just has to find out what that reason is. He could excuse a few days of this kind of behavior, but as he draws on a full week of it, RK900 knows something else is at play. His interest flares, sharpened by irritation.

“Detective,” he tries at some point, his hand closing tight around Gavin’s upper arm. “I would like to talk to you.”

Gavin responds with a full-body shudder and rips himself out of RK900’s grip. “Fuck off, you overglorified Roomba,” he spits. “Stay the fuck away from me.”

It takes less than a second to scan his vitals, and RK900 believes it is anger, at first, until he matches it up against Gavin’s reaction in the cab. Things fall into place very quickly after that.

Gavin isn’t angry. He’s embarrassed.

RK900 spends that night going over all his data on Gavin Reed. It takes hours and far more processing power than he cares to admit, and he turns up to work the next day as close to _tired_ as he has ever been, but the understanding he had come to made it worth it. Gavin, as usual, turns up late. He doesn’t greet RK900, but when he notices him staring he half-rises from his seat with the pinched look of someone ready to start a fight.

He doesn’t, though. Even Gavin Reed isn’t that stupid, though at that point RK900 wouldn’t put it past him. Gavin shoves away from the desk and grumbles something about taking a piss the same moment RK900’s terminal pings with an email from Fowler asking why their case isn’t going anywhere.

The combination of events, his flagging processing power, and Gavin’s temper hotwire a reaction he has never experienced before.

He’s pissed off.

With worryingly little forethought, RK900 rises and heads after Gavin. He shoulders open the door to the men’s bathroom just as Gavin’s re-fastening his belt.

“So androids can piss now?” Gavin asks unkindly. It grates against RK900’s patience and he decides that he has had enough.

Wordlessly, RK900 advances until he’s practically on top of Gavin. The moment Gavin tries to push past him, however, RK900’s hand finds his throat and _grips_ it, and Gavin makes a noise that tells RK900 everything he needs to know.

“I’ve grown tired of your sulking, Detective,” RK900 announces. Gavin’s eyes fix on him, unblinking. He squeezes, just for the fun of it, and finds that he quite enjoys the way Gavin bares his teeth.

He does not, however, enjoy when Gavin spits in his face.

Gavin’s back hits the tile with more than enough force to wind him. His entire weight lies hinged on RK900’s hand – a single, powerful hand against Gavin’s trachea. He can’t breathe. His own hands shoot up to grasp at RK900’s wrist and RK900 doesn’t so much as flinch. He only looks down his nose at Gavin with the same disgust he had _that_ night, and Gavin’s gut twists.

“You may be able to fool the others, but you do not fool me.” He grips even tighter when Gavin begins to struggle, his lips slick with spit and his face already beginning to flush dark. It’s pleasing. “You act out like a child angling for attention. Angling for discipline. Am I correct, Detective?”

RK900 knows full well that Gavin couldn’t reply even if he wanted to. He can barely breathe, choking on the air and his own saliva, his hips shuddering as he draws perilously close to unconsciousness. But he asks all the same, because he knows it’s humiliating, and Gavin bares his teeth just how RK900 likes. He might have tried to spit at him again if he had the strength.

“Your petulance is affecting not only your work, but also mine, and that is unacceptable.”

Gavin lets out a choked-off noise, his eyes rolling wildly. Reading his vitals brings RK900 the most primal form of pleasure he has ever experienced – he’s a hair’s breadth from passing out. Probably can’t even hear him speaking. With a sigh, RK900 relents, and Gavin drops to the floor like a dead weight.

It’s fortunate, then, that he lands the way he does, knees spread apart. RK900 jams the sole of a pristine, polished shoe right against Gavin’s fly and is pleased with what he finds there. He presses down, grinds, and Gavin sucks in breath after shuddering breath.

“I may be moved to forgive you,” RK900 continues, grinding down against Gavin’s crotch with his heel. Gavin chokes, cants his hips, flushes deep with shame. “If you beg.”

Gavin’s hand shoots out to grip his ankle and RK900 knows he hit the nail on the fucking head.

“P- pl-,” Gavin tries, his words lost in the tempest of harsh breaths and bitten-off noises. He pushes up against RK900’s shoe. “Please –,”

That word – that _one_ word – shoots right to that infuriating knot of coding and unravels it to nothing. Relief and satisfaction flood RK900’s sensors all at once, and it’s _good_.

“Do it,” he says, and it brushes close to a snarl; Gavin’s eyelids flutter and there are tears there, wet on his cheeks, a bruise already beginning to blossom beneath his ear where RK900’s thumb had been. “Rut against my shoe like a dog. It’s only fitting, after all.”

Gavin meets his eyes blearily, balanced on the fine precipice between his dignity and promised relief. He looks away, sweat glistening on his neck, and swallows past his rasping breath. His fingers tighten around RK900’s ankle, and for a moment RK900 thinks he might just pull away.

Then he pulls RK900’s shoe tighter against his groin and begins to _hump_.

Many things happen all at once. RK900 is overloaded by what he can only describe as _pleasure_ , Gavin pitches forward and mouths at his shin, and without thinking RK900 wrenches his foot from between Gavin’s legs and uses it to shove him backwards, right in the middle of his chest.

“I will offer you an ultimatum, Detective,” RK900 says. His voice is infuriatingly smooth. Unflustered. Gavin _hates_ him. He hates him so fucking much and he’s never been harder in his life. “If you agree to work on this case properly, and if it is solved, then I will give you whatever you need.”

Holy fuck. He’s – Gavin’s gotta be dreaming. There is no fucking way this can be real. His throat throbs from the memory of RK900’s hand around it. His dick _pulses_ , straining painfully at his fly. Swallowing is impossible; his mouth has grown sticky and dry. Somehow, he’s able to rasp, “And if I don’t?”

RK900 smiles kindly and Gavin suddenly doesn’t want to know the answer.

“Think about it, Detective,” RK900 says instead, and then he just – turns and leaves. Gavin is left alone on the tile, painfully aroused and very much alone. He half-crawls to one of the stalls and cums the moment his hand closes around his dick.

* * *

Hank Anderson is many things, but an idiot isn’t one of them.

He knows something’s going on with Reed and RK900. He gets why Fowler decided to team them up, naturally – Gavin’s a piece of shit who needs to be knocked down a peg or two, and RK900 fits that bill _and_ some. At first, Gavin had reacted accordingly: he’d spat and kicked and screamed, much to the amusement of the rest of the department. Lately, though… he’d been different. Maybe giving RK900 the cold shoulder and ignoring literally everybody else was a new tactic, but Hank knew better.

So, it seemed, did Connor.

“You gonna get some work done?” Hank asks, only a bit annoyed. “Or are you gonna keep staring at ol’ Terminator over there?”

Connor ducks his head like he’s embarrassed at being caught. Christ, it’s fucking adorable – even though they were designed with eerily similar faces, Connor and RK900 honestly couldn’t be more different. Hank’s just glad he got the cute one.

“His demeanor has changed to an astounding degree,” Connor tells him, careful to keep his voice low. “I think something has happened between him and the detective.”

Hank snorts. “Yeah, well, so long as it gets Reed off my dick, I’m all for it.”

Connor’s entire face shutters.

“Expression,” Hank explains quickly. The thought of Reed _on_ his dick is enough to make him a little queasy; he tells Connor as much and is rewarded with one of those little half-smiles. He still isn’t used to all of Connor’s quirky little reactions – seeing him navigate human-like responses and expressions and _quirks_ makes Hank inordinately happy. Happier than he’s been in years. Now _he’s_ the one staring, but Connor doesn’t say anything. The kid loves the attention and Hank knows it.

Gavin half-stumbles back to his desk soon after, and even from across the room Hank can see the angry red mark coming up under his ear. Not quite a hickey, but it’s close enough, and Hank hadn’t become Detroit’s youngest lieutenant for nothing.

It’s on the way home from work that Connor tells him about the conversation he’d had with RK900. “He asked me how to get into the detective’s good graces, and it… made me think about when I was first assigned to the DPD. To you. How you reacted to me and how I mitigated that. The things I did and how they affected your opinion of me. How they affected our relationship.” His expression grows crooked. “RK900 said he was troubled. I think that’s how I felt, too, back then. I think about it now, sometimes, and the memories don’t feel like my own.”

Hank pulls into his driveway and shuts off the engine. They sit there for a minute without speaking. Hank itches to reach across and touch Connor, somehow, somewhere, but he doesn’t. The heat seeps from the air and, finally, he sighs and shoulders open the door. Connor soon follows, ducking into the warm half-darkness. Sumo lumbers over to greet them; Connor goes to turn on the heating while Hank lets Sumo out.

When he returns from the yard, he finds Connor standing alone in the dark. His LED is yellow. Hank’s jaw clenches at the sight of it. The room is silent except for Sumo’s sloppy lapping at his water bowl and the jingle of his collar, the click of his nails against the lino.

“Hank?”

Hank makes an affirmative noise as he fills Sumo’s food bowl.

“Am I – good?”

Something lurches in Hank’s belly, then. The question is so unexpected that he isn’t sure how to react, at first. But he knows that Connor is prone to second-guessing himself, of falling back into memories of a time when things weren’t as easy. They’re not so different in that regard.

Despite the somewhat melancholy set of Connor’s features, Hank grumbles out a chuckle and goes over to him, until he’s in an arm’s reach. Finally, he touches him – a warm hand to the back of his neck. “Yeah, Con.”

Those darling eyes rise to meet his and he knows Connor isn’t convinced. Never is. He takes Connor’s face into his hands and looks upon him with all the affection he’s usually too afraid to show, stroking his thumbs across those perfect cheekbones, the shallow dimple in his chin, the dips of his jowls. Perfect, perfect boy.

“Tell me,” Connor pleads, and Hank feels like he’s drowning.

It’s something they do, sometimes. Not always, just when Connor gets mired in self-doubt, when he needs to be reminded. The things he’d done as a machine still weighed on him, and Hank knew how difficult that burden could be.

“You’re good, sweetheart,” he promises. Hank isn’t used to speaking so gently; his voice is gruff and low, but Connor’s eyelids shiver, and Hank knows he’s pleased. “So good. So good for me.”

Connor’s throat bobs. He keens somewhere deep in his throat and Hank can’t resist the urge to kiss him right on his soft, pink mouth. _Fuckin’ CyberLife perverts,_ Hank thinks (has thought, many times before), _giving him lips like this._

He presses a whiskery kiss to the shell of Connor’s ear. “My good boy.”

Connor presses in close, tucking his face into Hank’s neck. “Take me to bed, Hank.” The request is said so softly that there is no way in hell Hank could ever resist it. He could never resist Connor.

“Feeling frisky, huh?” he asks as he deposits Connor onto the bed. Connor smiles coyly and the sight of him spreading his legs shoots right to Hank’s dick. He rubs at it through his pants, Connor’s eyes tracking the motion hungrily, and grins.

“Hank –,” Connor begins in a half-whine, shuffling back as Hank kneels on the mattress, two huge hands on Connor’s knees, pushing them apart. Connor, the brat, has the nerve to flush.

“What’d you wear for me today?” Hank asks, helping Connor shimmy out of his pants and running his fingers down the insides of Connor’s thighs; Christ, the kid’s got legs that go on for miles, pale and smooth. Hank wants to sink his teeth into them. Shyly, almost, Connor parts his legs fully to reveal a gorgeous pink cunt already glistening with slick. Hank’s mouth very nearly waters at the sight of it.

“I know it’s your favorite,” Connor offers, voice hushed and lovely. Hank’s dick twitches. He frowns.

“My favorite’s whatever you decide to wear,” he corrects, leaning his weight up over Connor and kissing him firmly. He lets the back of his knuckles drag across the wiry hair cresting Connor’s mound, so close yet not close enough, and the boy’s hips shift up against the touch. “You’re always gorgeous, honey. Still can’t believe you chose an old bastard like me.”

Connor flushes at the attention, the blessed boy – sure, he might be a literal killing machine who can run twice the speed of any human and incapacitate a room full of soldiers in seconds, but when it comes to Hank’s lumbering affection he’s as eager as a lamb, all warm brown eyes and shivering limbs. All he wants to do is _please_. Maybe it’s a shadow of his old programming, harkening back to his most basic function: _obey_. It’s different now, sure, but whatever. Hank can’t find it in himself to care, not when aforementioned killing machine is whimpering for his dick.

He cups Connor’s cheek, kisses him. It’s so easy to get him wound up – all it takes is a few touches here and there, a few well-placed kisses, a few well-picked words. Sometimes Connor likes him to be mean. This isn’t one of those times. Now, he wants to be _good_.

“My good, sweet boy,” Hank croons in his ear, working open the buttons of Connor’s shirt. They fumble around and undress, and Hank falls in love with the way Connor’s body flushes pink all over for the fifth time that week. He sits back on his heels, taps his thigh. “Come get that pretty mouth on my dick, huh?”

Connor practically falls over himself in his eagerness to obey. Hank cards his hand through Connor’s hair as the android mouths along his dick, pink tongue glistening and eyes fluttering like it’s the most delectable thing in the world. Hank doesn’t pull, doesn’t tug, doesn’t fuck that pretty face – not tonight, anyway. He lets out another rumbling laugh. “You look pretty as a picture, Con,” he murmurs as Connor takes him into his mouth. “Christ, that feels good.”

Connor hums. He loves making Hank feel good.

Hank lets Connor bob up and down on his cock for a while, more for the android’s benefit than his own; Connor loves it, partly due to his weird little oral fixation ( _CyberLife perverts,_ Hank thinks yet again) and partly because he enjoys making Hank happy. And Hank is _always_ happy when Connor’s mouth is on his dick. But Hank isn’t as young as he used to be and Connor’s mouth quickly becomes dangerous. Gently, he levers Connor off his cock.

“Any more of that and I’m gonna bust,” he huffs. It’s been a long day, he’s tired, and they both know he won’t be getting it up again tonight. He gives his cock a few long strokes, lets his boy watch and lick those pink, spit-slick lips. Hungry. “Only got one shot at this, kid, and I know exactly where I’m want it to go.”

He doesn’t miss the shiver that slips up Connor’s spine. His anticipation shines so brightly, and he throws himself down onto his back, hands hooked behind his knees so he can lift and spread his legs, putting himself on display. He looks at Hank with nothing short of reverence, and for a moment Hank feels like the most important person in the whole goddamn world.

Chuckling at Connor’s eagerness, he turns his palm up and slips a single, thick finger inside Connor’s pussy. It’s tight and warm and dripping wet, flushed a deep, dusky pink. Connor bites down on his lip, brow crumpling a little.

“I don’t need to get you ready, do I?” Hank asks; it’s rhetorical, because of course it is. “I could fuck you right now, like this, and you’d love it. Wouldn’t you?”

Heaving in a desperate breath to try and cool his systems, Connor nods, eyes wet with tears. He needs it. He needs it so _badly_. He needs it, needs Hank –

His plea is punched out of him by the dick that’s splitting him open, carving out a space for itself as he pushes in deep. It’s an aborted sound, ringing with the same edge that microphone feedback would. Connor can’t move, can barely think; all he can do is lie there and let Hank press him in half, fucking into him with long, deep, _slow_ strokes. Crooning in his ear, telling him how good he’s being, how perfect. Calling him _sweetheart_ and _darlin’_ and _mine._

Connor sobs as he comes. The sensation is so terrific that he has to do a soft reboot, shuttering entirely out of consciousness for a fraction of a second before Hank is holding himself inside and pumping him full.

“Oh, Connor,” Hank pants against his temple, kissing that little flashing light. “So good to me. So good. My darling boy.”

Hank holds him like that, and Connor’s fears finally fall silent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> god im so horny for RK800 "praise kink" Connor i couldnt resist


	5. V

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> btw i have no knowledge whatsoever on how police work and tbh i couldn't be fucked to find out

Gavin’s day had gone from bad to worse to a fucking _nightmare_ in less time than it took for his coffee to go cold. Firstly, he’d had to look at RK900 all morning. Then said RK900 had cornered him in the bathroom, which, you know, was fucking weird but also somewhat arousing. Then the bastard had _lifted Gavin by his fucking throat_ and choked him out, and then Gavin had _humped his shoe_ and _begged_ –

“You look like you’re gonna cry,” Chris told him, mystified, as he set down a file on Gavin’s desk. RK900 was, thankfully, not there.

“Might do,” Gavin mutters, and it’s dangerously close to the truth.

Then Chris whistles under his breath, and, somehow, things get even shittier than they were before.

“You get lucky, Reed?”

Reflexively, Gavin slaps a hand against his neck. The fucking thumbprint. Somewhere underneath his many blankets of rage, humiliation, and fucking _betrayal_ , he’s grateful that it can pass off as a normal-looking hickey.

“Fuck off.”

Gavin’s reply hits Chris differently than usual, and he takes that as his cue to leave; he’d already ignored Tina’s advice to give Gavin a wide berth. And that should have been the end of it.

It wasn’t, of course.

Gavin Reed had dug his own grave purely by being so difficult to deal with; he worked well alone, he was _happy_ to work alone, and he had somehow convinced himself that meaningful relationships were something he’d be better off without. As such, he didn’t date, and was very careful to keep the particulars of his sex life under wraps. He’d brag about it, sure, because that’s the kind of asshole he is, but for him to be marked up so obviously… well. It was something to talk about.

Hank made an absolute sport out of it, naturally. He only let off when RK900 returned from the archives and fixed him with that unreadable, ice-hard stare.

That night Gavin thinks about what RK900 had offered. _I will give you whatever you need._ He must have seen right through Gavin, through all his reactions – unsurprising, really, given that he’s a robot literally built to solve things. He should have known better than to think he could hide anything from RK900, even the darker facets of his sex life. He tries his hardest not to jerk off to the memory of RK900’s hand around his neck. He fails.

It takes Gavin a pathetically short amount of time to make his decision. Not that he’d admit it, of course – when RK900 notices he’s working again and raises his brows in question, Gavin spits out and insists that it’s just to get Fowler off his back. RK900 pretends to believe him, but the look he gives Gavin is enough to give him a half-chub right there in the bullpen.

RK900 thinks about the incident in the bathroom a lot. Perhaps more often than he should. It’s worrying, really, the way Gavin responds to pain. To danger. RK900 might be concerned if he himself didn’t like it so much, if he wasn’t so confident in his ability to give Gavin what he wanted without seriously injuring him. What does concern him, however, is Gavin’s self-management.

It’s a human thing, he has learned. Humans seek pain for many reasons. Sometimes through others, sometimes through themselves. Gavin does both. RK900 has yet to find out why, but he strongly suspects it goes hand-in-hand with the anger he still hasn’t forgotten. He can still smell it; he hungers for it.

 _Anticipate what he needs,_ Connor had told him. _Meet it._

Logical.

Their sweep of local CyberLife stores comes up empty. The trail is going cold quickly and Gavin is growing restless, prowling around like a starving dog. RK900 watches him get cup after cup of coffee before eventually taking them right from his hands. “You have already exceeded your recommended daily caffeine intake,” he tells Gavin blandly. “I’m afraid I must restrict your consumption from now on.”

RK900 knows the punch is coming before Gavin even raises his fist. He catches it easily, just like he always does, and squeezes Gavin’s knuckles just hard enough to be painful. The wince that crosses Gavin’s face is well worth it.

They receive a call just before they plan on punching out; it’s from across town, in the ritzier part, which perplexes both RK900 and Gavin. So far, these murders have all been in lower-mid socioeconomic areas, usually centered in the same locale. The outlier throws them both for a loop, but they decide to head to the scene anyway. Gavin is practically champing at the bit.

RK900 rattles off the details as they drive, watching as Gavin’s fingers twitch against the steering wheel, streetlamps glancing white across his knuckles. Seeing Gavin practically thrumming with energy is… invigorating. Thrill of the chase. RK900 decides that it suits him.

They are met by an officer, ashen-faced and very clearly nervous, just beyond the police tape. Gavin keys onto her behavior immediately, his shoulders tensing, eyes impossibly clear.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, and the officer licks her lips, eyes darting between them.

“It’s the android,” she begins. “It’s… it’s still alive.”

Gavin’ heart almost leaps clear out of his throat. Alive – that could mean anything. If the android is still coherent then they might be able to get something out of it, some sort of lead. If not, then… well. There’s only one way to find out.

RK900 is hot on his heels as he pushes through the onlookers. It’s a hotel, modest in size but clearly not cheap, and the other patrons peer around doorways to try and glean a look despite being told to remain in their rooms. Gavin feels… grimy. RK900 looks just fine, obviously, thanks in no small part to his height and his stupid-handsome face and the way he carries himself like he owns the place. They’re directed towards one of the suites.

“Fuck,” Gavin whistles.

On the bed is an android, spread-eagle, bound hand and foot. Except… not really bound, because its limbs aren’t actually attached to its body. They’d been torn from the torso with very little regard for precision; someone had taken great joy in dismembering this android. Gavin glances at RK900 from the corner of his eye. He gives nothing away, as usual. The fucker’s LED is still blue, too, as if the sight of a dismembered corpse doesn’t even bother him. Gavin wishes he knew better, but he doesn’t. He can never fucking tell with RK900.

“Help.”

The android – it’s so damaged that they can’t even tell if it’s a male or female model – unhinges its jaw and speaks. It’s one word, said smoothly, but the audio output isn’t synced with physical movement. It’s creepy.

“Help.”

Again.

“A looped message,” RK900 murmurs. “I could try interfacing with it to access its memories.”

Gavin narrows his eyes. “That shit’s illegal now, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think this android is in much of a position to discuss consent,” RK900 says dryly, and Gavin feels stupid for ever having asked.

“I mean – you sure that’s a good idea? It could have all kinds of junk up in its – whatever the fuck. Viruses and shit.” He gestures towards the android and wonders how RK900 could ever stand to lay his hands on the thing. And yet concern is lodged up under his ribs, tempered by the equally dry smile RK900 gives him. Gavin almost chokes when he realizes it’s the first time he’s ever seen the RK900 smile. It’s… it’s a good look. He’s so fucking handsome, Jesus Christ. Gavin hasn’t felt this kind of gay panic since he was a teenager.

“Careful, Detective,” RK900 says lowly. “You almost sound concerned about me.”

Gavin wants to knock out his teeth. He might’ve even tried if he didn’t know he’d shatter every knuckle in his hand before managing to land a scrape. Instead he wheezes out some half-baked reply and turns his back.

RK900 turns his attention to the android, still croaking out the endless _help, help, help._ He leans over the bed, inspects the internal cavity – yes, it’s the same as the others, the thirium valve sheared neatly in half. The sheets are smeared with it, but not as much as they should be. Harvested. RK900 reaches down, lets his skin lapse back, chassis gleaming in the low light. _Help, help, help._

He is engulfed immediately. The android’s memories are a current that sucks him right under, and he struggles to make sense of any of it without getting completely overwhelmed. Not only memories – trauma. There is no control, no order, the android’s shattered systems scrambling for purchase. He feels the pain as if it is his own, the fear, the desperation. It rasps through him, slithering and wet, and his joints freeze up.

There is a gunshot, then silence. The memories close up. The sensations withdraw. Everything becomes still.

“All right, tin man, we’re taking a break.” RK900 is very vaguely aware of pressure against his torso; a hand, pushing him, until the close air of the hotel suite opens out into something colder, freer. His vision returns and he finds Gavin standing there, gun in one hand and RK900’s wrist in the other. He stares at the fingers around his wrist, dark against the white of his chassis, and doesn’t pull away.

* * *

There have been very few times in Gavin Reed’s life when he has experienced genuine, mind-numbing terror. It happens less than he expected, what with being a cop and all, and he’s grateful for that, but it’s a sensation he knows well enough.

Driving out to some ritzy hotel, it’s the last thing he expected.

Sure, he knew about the time Connor interfaced with that android at the Stratford Tower, but he’d never given it any great deal of thought. Maybe he should have. Maybe, if he _did_ , he would have known how dangerous it was to go around interacting with damaged, traumatized androids. Maybe he could’ve spared RK900 the experience.

But he didn’t know, so he waved RK900 towards the body on the bed like it was nothing, only to watch RK900 go through the android version of an emergency shut-down. The spasticity in RK900’s face, the way his entire body froze up, the staring glassiness of his eyes – it aroused a wrongness that Gavin felt in each cell of his body, a scream of instinct, like fight-or-flight magnified tenfold. That LED flashed red, spinning and spinning and spinning, too quick for Gavin’s vision to follow. And then RK900 had opened his mouth, and the _noise_ that came out of it – Gavin still can’t stand to think about it.

They’re here, now, sat outside the hotel, smoking. Well, Gavin’s smoking – RK900 is watching the traffic in silence. He’s frowning and his back is stiff as a board, but he’s okay. He’s okay.

“You didn’t hear me shouting or anything,” Gavin goes on. “Just stood there with your mood ring all red and flashing.”

“You shouldn’t have shot it,” RK900 replies stiffly, very obviously not pleased at all. “There could be more information –,”

“Fuck that!” Gavin can’t help the outburst. “Don’t be fuckin’ insane. I’ve never seen a bot do what you did. You looked like – I dunno, like you were blue-screening the fuck out. No way.” He doesn’t look at RK900; he can’t bear to.

 _You were concerned about me._ RK900 doesn’t say it, but it hangs in the space between them anyway, Gavin pointedly ignoring it as he chews his way through the cigarette. Eventually he turns and snaps at RK900 to stop staring at him, grinding the butt under his foot and heading back to his car.

RK900 doesn’t look pale. Androids can’t look pale. They can’t look sick or in shock the same way humans can. He does, however, look different – what he had experienced in that hotel suite had affected him more than he was letting on. Gavin may be an idiot, but he isn’t fucking _stupid_ , and he knows RK900 more than he’d like to, enough to know when something’s up. Christ, isn’t that a thought. He doesn’t push it.

The halogen lights aren’t kind to them, but even in the near-empty bullpen RK900 still manages to look like he stepped out of a magazine. Since when had he taken to wearing turtlenecks? Since when was it legal for them to look that fucking _good_ on him? Like some Bond villain? Gavin feels yet another crisis rising in his throat and hastily forces it back down again.

“I have finished sorting through the data from the android,” RK900 says as he sits down at his desk. “I believe we may be able to run facial recognition software on the optical footage.” He lifts his eyes from the screen, then, and holds Gavin’s gaze for a few beats longer than he should. “Would you like to see?”

Gavin has never been very good at controlling his curiosity. “Fuck yeah I do.”

The feed is grainy, obviously glitching out. RK900 explains that the android’s head had been damaged from behind, and that the trauma had affected the optical output. Still – it’s enough. The bullpen is silent as they watch the android being dragged to the bed and fastened to it. There’s a man that Gavin doesn’t recognize; he holds something up in front of the android’s face.

“Vocal unit,” RK900 murmurs. “They removed it so as not to raise suspicion.”

Gavin licks his lips, which are suddenly very dry. “It spoke, though –,”

“A pre-recording.”

They continue to watch as the android is roped down. The first man’s face is broad and fixed with a near-constant leer. He’s clearly enjoying himself, and Gavin knows he’s high on something. They watch in uneasy silence as the android’s vision fizzles with trauma. The error warnings pop up beside the optical video, RK900 having cleared them from the main display for ease of viewing, and they read out damage to the android’s limbs. Then, towards the end, another man comes into view, looming above the android. His face is joyless, but he smiles as he raises a heavy-looking set of shears. He’s _showing_ them to the android. He says something, but Gavin can’t read his lips. It’s obvious when they open the android’s body and locate the valve. It’s even more obvious when they cut through it, and a few seconds later the feed goes dead.

Gavin’s face is white. RK900 moves first, curious as to why Gavin hasn’t spoken. He bristles when he sees his expression.

“That second guy,” Gavin croaks. “With the shears.”

RK900 pauses. “What about him?” he prompts gently. Gavin started to breathe hard through his nose.

“I know him.”

What follows is worryingly like an interrogation. Gavin, at first, is unwilling to talk. He sits there at his desk, spinning in lazy circles, and refuses to engage RK900 at all. In fact, it takes multiple cups of coffee and a box of Chinese take-out before RK900 is able to bribe Gavin into revealing what he knows, as if he isn’t one of the cops working the case in the first place.

Then he tries to deflect it, saying he’d talk to Fowler in the morning, that there’s nothing more they can do tonight anyway – anything to excuse himself from the situation he has found himself in. RK900 doesn’t let him run, though, each attempt diverted by a fist in the back of his jacket. The longer it goes on, however, the less angry he becomes – RK900 begins to understand that this isn’t Gavin trying to grind his nerves. No, no, this is something different. Gavin, he realizes rather suddenly, _really_ doesn’t want to talk about it.

 _Perhaps they are previous acquaintances,_ RK900 thinks. He weighs up the possibilities, crunches the numbers, but it all unravels. There’s too many differentials. Hell, Gavin could know him from a previous case – he might never have even met him. RK900 couldn’t pull up anything on him, either. Not a single crossed wire.

RK900’s internal monitor tells him it’s nearing 3 o’clock in the morning. Gavin slumps in his chair, his eyes sunken with tiredness. He’s given up on saying anything at all, and his thumbnail is bitted raw, right down to the quick. RK900 focusses on it, fixated. His caffeine intake is too high, his stress levels are too high, and he needs to sleep. Badly.

“Why won’t you tell me?” he asks, drawing Gavin’s attention from the fly sitting on the corner of his monitor. “Are you hiding something?”

The sneer Gavin gives him is unkind. It’s like he’s laughing at him without making a single sound, and RK900 feels a prickle of irritation pass up between his shoulder blades.

“Nah,” he replies, and offers nothing further.

There is a silence; a pause. RK900 asks, “Why do you hate androids, Detective?”

Gavin turns a peculiar shade of white and, unsurprisingly, refuses to answer him.

RK900 watches him as he drops off to sleep around 3:30am. He considers waking him up and telling him to go home, but Gavin is in no fit state to drive, and the only thing more unhelpful than an obstinate detective was a dead one. So, seeing nothing else for it, he gingerly takes Gavin into his arms, carrying him as one would a child. He barely stirs; his exhaustion must run deeper than RK900 thought. His weight is heavy, familiar despite RK900 never having borne it before. Calls a cab, eases Gavin into it, and then gets in himself. They sit there in the dark and RK900 occupies himself listening to Gavin’s breathing. It’s a strangely intimate thing, and where he’d expected discomfort he cannot find it – he is calm and still, like the sea. _The sea,_ he thinks, amused, glancing at Gavin, whose weight pivots against his shoulder when the taxi rounds a corner. _Beating itself against a stubborn, unmoving cliff._

RK900 carries Gavin from the taxi to his apartment. The keys are in the detective’s jacket, and RK900 lets his hand linger a little, just to drink in the warmth. Gavin, he had noticed, ran warmer than most humans. RK900 thought about the anger that rattled between his ribs, in his bones, and procured the image of a flame lit somewhere inside him; logically he knew it was impossible, but there was a wayward stream in his code that made him wonder.

Gavin’s apartment is dark. RK900 hears a minute shift of movement – a small animal, quickly estimated to be a feline. That amuses RK900, too. Star-bright eyes watch him warily from under the sofa as he navigates his way to Gavin’s bedroom.

Unmade bed; unsurprising. Dirty laundry all over the floor; unsurprising. Approximately 15 empty water bottles stowed under the bed; unsurprising. It is all just as RK900 had pictured it.

The realization jars. _Pictured it_? Ah, yes – because he _had_ pictured it, before. He’d watched Gavin kick a stone into the gutter and wondered how he lived, what his home was like, what sort of company he kept. RK900 deduced that he most likely lived alone in a small-to-moderate dwelling, that he was messy, and didn’t bother keeping things tidy. He has been right, of course, but it’s jarring, because RK900 really had no reason to deduce anything in the first place.

“You don’t need a reason,” Connor had told him once, perplexed. “You don’t have to have a reason for everything. Sometimes you just – want to. And that’s enough.”

_It’s enough._

RK900 places Gavin down stiffly. He helps him navigate his way out of his jacket and his shoes, Gavin barely awake enough to respond. There is a chill to the air, so he throws a blanket over him, and by the time he reaches the front door again, Gavin is already snoring.

He turns to face the cat, who now sits on the arm of the sofa, eyes wide and dark and all-seeing in the night. They stare, RK900 and that cat, and RK900 feels strangely like the animal can read between every line of his code.

It is RK900 who breaks first.


	6. VI

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this fic did NOT get the big brain energy it deserves

RK900 is, unsurprisingly, spot on time the next morning. Gavin, even more unsurprisingly, is not.

When Gavin first drags himself into the bullpen, his eyes fall on RK900, and he stops. His face blanches with apprehension and RK900 can’t help but wonder why. He has been full of questions, lately; he tried asking Connor, but it was a dead end. Connor just gave him that puppy-dog smile and said there was nothing he could do, really – these were things RK900 had to figure out himself. Curiosities, he’d said, problems that could only be solved through experience and introspection.

“Good morning, Detective,” RK900 greets him, just as he does every other morning, when Gavin finally arrives at his desk. Gavin looks… brittle. Very tired. He sits, heavily, and spends a moment or two just _staring_. He has never stared at RK900 before. Not like this.

“Yeah, uh, listen. Can we talk? Not – not here. Somewhere private.” Gavin’s throat bobs as he swallows and RK900’s attention is fixed on it.

“Of course,” RK900 replies without looking up. He stands. “Interview room 5 is free.”

Gavin gestures for him to lead the way, and they head towards the interrogation cells in silence. RK900 is strangely on edge. The lighting is unkind, and Gavin – somehow – looks even worse beneath it.

“I –,” Gavin begins once they’re sealed off; he coughs, rubs at his mouth, doesn’t meet RK900’s eye. “The guy. Yeah. I know him. I used to – used to hang out with a bad crowd when I was younger, y’know? We, uh –,” He makes an aborted gesture that RK900 cannot decipher. “Did some bad shit. Petty crime, drugs, the usual. I cleaned up, thank God, but the others… some didn’t. _He_ didn’t. Most of us were desperate, but I think he just – he just _liked_ it.”

RK900 doesn’t react. He wants to. Gavin’s vitals jump all over the place and RK900 wants – almost _needs_ – to do something to calm him. _He is distressed_ , RK900 realizes. _Talking about his past is difficult for him. A bad past – bad memories. Things he has forgotten and doesn’t want to exhume._

Gratitude flickers deep in his body, overwhelmingly organic. RK900’s hand rises without thought, the heel of it pressing right over his solar plexus, where the feeling is strongest.

“A name,” RK900 says. The evenness of his tone seems to settle Gavin, somewhat. “A name would be a good place to start.”

It’s funny – RK900’s utter lack of reaction seems to facilitate the best outcome possible for that situation. Gavin is tired and uncomfortable and angry, like he usually is, but it all just… simmers. Falls flat. He has quietened. He casts small, halting looks at RK900 and shifts his weight like he’s uncomfortable.

So Gavin tells him. His name is Alex Howard, and immediately RK900 groans beneath the weight of his criminal record, mostly instances of public indecency and burglary, flavored by a few cases of sexual assault. The smile Gavin gives him is unkind and shows the barest hint of teeth.

“Thank you,” RK900 says. Gavin sags against the table and RK900 realizes that he has never seen him like this. There is a tenderness to the way his body surrenders, a softness RK900 never noticed before. Gavin glares at him when he speaks, though there is little heat behind it. “You have done well.”

Something in Gavin’s expression changes. The muscles of his jaw twitch. He pointedly refuses to look at RK900, who in turn allows his gaze to linger purely because he likes the way Gavin flinches beneath it. He is reminded of the incident in the bathroom – suddenly, unexpectedly, tearing through his processors before he can stop it – and how Gavin had been the same then, too.

He recalls how Gavin had said _please_ and he has to draw in a deep inhale to stop his cooling fans from chittering.

“The fuck’re you staring at?” Gavin grits out. There is an ugly red flush climbing his neck and RK900 is seizure by the urge to put his hand against it. Against the flush, against Gavin’s neck, against the yellowing bruise left by his thumb, tucked neatly beneath his ear.

So he does.

Gavin’s muscles jump nervously under his hand, and for a few seconds he doesn’t say anything. Logically, RK900 knows that this kind of impulse should panic him, but there’s something about the shiver of Gavin’s trachea under the pad of his thumb that keeps him still, keeps his systems humming smooth.

“Would you like a reward?”

Gavin almost pulls away, baring his teeth in a sneer. “What do you think I am, a fuckin’ dog?”

Unblinkingly, RK900 replies, “From your actions and your attitude, I am inclined towards the affirmative.”

A concerning insult; it doesn’t make sense, not even to him, as if the words had merely aligned themselves without his input. His preconstruction software got ahead of him, angling for the right thing to say, and this – _this_ – had been it. Immediately, RK900 registers the startle of Gavin’s pulse, his trembling eyelids, his grinding teeth. RK900 does not hold him tightly; Gavin could leave if he wished to.

But he doesn’t.

His eyes remain fixed squarely on RK900’s. Then he surrenders his weight, just a little, against the close press of the hand at his throat. Swallows. Says nothing. RK900 can barely help the small turn of his mouth.

Gavin punches out a chopped-off breath as RK900’s grip tightens. He’s fully aware how easy it would be for RK900 to snap him like a toothpick – the thing was _made_ to destroy. It’s a titillating thought, and for once Gavin doesn’t push it away, allowing himself to feel it fully. RK900 is behind him, then, his grip hard, promising. He can feel the push and pull of breathing against his ear, but RK900 doesn’t say anything. He just _squeezes_ with one hand, the other moving to work open Gavin’s belt. And Gavin – Gavin does absolutely nothing to stop him.

The amount of times he’s jacked off to what happened in the bathroom was… embarrassing. But, God, if it hadn’t been so long since he’d been manhandled like that – in fact he’d _never_ been manhandled like that, especially not by an android, and especially not by a practically military-grade model. Everything about that situation was right out of a wet dream, as if CyberLife had sent the RK900 purely for the purpose of tormenting him. Gavin wondered if that was how Anderson had felt about Connor, and for the first time, he actually felt a little bad about antagonizing him so much.

“Fuck –,” Gavin hisses as RK900’s hand pushes into his boxers, closing around his dick and _jerking_. It isn’t gentle and it’s far too dry – just enough to be uncomfortable – and yet that only seems to make it better. Gavin wants to fucking _die_. Instead, though, he only presses his hips up into RK900’s hand with a pathetic jingle of his belt.

“Good,” RK900 says, low and silky-smooth, and Gavin startles at how close his voice is. “See, Detective? This is what happens when you follow directions. You get rewarded.” The way he says it is like a scolding schoolteacher, making whatever blood is left in Gavin’s brain shoot right down to his dick. RK900’s sensors drink in every sound, every minute twitch, the growing agitation of Gavin’s physiology flooding him as pleasure might.

His grip relents just as Gavin’s vision begins to grey around the edges, but his hand doesn’t leave Gavin’s throat. Coughing, Gavin swallows down lungful after lungful of air, wallowing in the glorious rush of blood back to his brain. It makes him dizzy. His cock is slick and so hard it’s almost painful, and RK900 squeezes him there, too, until Gavin’s biting down on a hiss. Then the hand is back, and he can’t _breathe_ , and he’s never felt so desperate to come in his entire fucking life.

“I gotta –,” he croaks, his spit-slick mouth barely able to form the words.

“Beg.”

Every nerve in Gavin’s body comes to life. RK900’s voice is pitched low, and he can practically _hear_ the antagonizing smile in it, and there are tears running tracks down his face – he’s _sweating_ , his hands gripping the arms of his chair so tightly that his knuckles look ready to pop from beneath the skin. His heart is everywhere. Throbbing. Painful. He needs it. He _needs_ it.

“Please let me – please –,”

RK900 makes a curious sound against his ear; it’s a high, chittering kind of noise, like when Gavin would shove sticks into his mother’s desk fan when he was a kid. He wishes he had something to bite down on; his teeth creak beneath the weight of his grinding.

And then RK900’s stroking stops, his fist closed right around the head of Gavin’s cock. Gavin honest-to-god _whines_ like a kicked dog.

“If you want to come, you have to work for it.” Gavin’s confusion only lasts for a moment, hazy and disjointed as it is, before he realizes what RK900 is going to make him do. It’s humiliating, and Gavin would rather have every finger and toe broken than do it. _Fuck_. Every part of his body tightens with need.

Haltingly, Gavin begins to fuck up into RK900’s fist. No – he isn’t worthy of fucking anything except a hand. His cheeks grow unbearably hot and the shame makes him shiver. He glances down and sees that the skin of RK900’s hand has retracted, the white plastic beneath shining with slick. Gavin makes another one of those choked-off noises. Not even worthy of fucking a _real_ hand – only a plastic one.

Gavin comes violently. RK900 times his tighten and release perfectly, allowing air to flood Gavin’s brain at just the right moment. He shoots all over the table, biting down on a shout; it filters out through his teeth, as weak and desperate as he feels. Gavin doesn’t know how long his climax lasts, but it feels like forever, and when he comes down again he slumps against RK900’s chest and tries to make the room stop spinning.

But RK900 isn’t done. He takes a fistful of Gavin’s hair and pitches him forward onto his knees. He’s eye-level with the mess he made and knows what RK900 wants him to do before he even speaks.

“Clean up your mess.”

Gavin knows he’ll hate himself later. He doesn’t resist – doesn’t say a goddamn word – doesn’t even look at RK900. He just does what he’s told, lathing the flat of his tongue against the tabletop and lapping up his cum. It’s vile. He adores it.

“Fuck,” he sobs, because he can’t help it. Here he is – at _work_ – pants down and dick out, licking up his own cum as an _android_ looks down at him like he’s the scum of the fucking earth. “Fuck. Fuck!”

By the time he picks himself up, the adrenaline has faded a little, and he glances at RK900 from bleary eyes and finds him just… watching. There’s a strange tightness in his face that Gavin hasn’t seen before, and for a brief moment he wonders if RK900 had _reacted_ , but a quick glance down at his crotch scratches that thought. Do androids even _have_ junk, anyway? Anderson would know, but Gavin would rather shoot himself than ask.

“You’re a fucking psycho,” is the first coherent thing he says, buckling up. He considered just leaving without saying _anything_ , but figured it would probably make things worse.

“Hardly,” RK900 replies, a little frosty. “I merely anticipated what would increase your performance and followed those parameters.”

Shame stings sharp in the back of Gavin’s throat. “So you weren’t into it?” he demands. He doesn’t mean to sound as angry as he does. “Just decided to choke me out and get me off because it might make me _work_ better?”

RK900 frowns. It’s a stern, handsome look. “No. I enjoyed it immensely, which is what I find most troubling. Your following orders outside that context is merely a fringe benefit.”

Gavin takes a few seconds to process that; there’s a lot to unpack, and after what had just happened he isn’t sure he’s got the brain cells left to do it. RK900, as usual, beats him to the punch.

“Let this be a lesson, detective – good work warrants rewards. Bad work warrants punishment. And as much of a glutton you seem to be for punishment, I can assure you that any disciplinary action I deem fit will not be the sort you find enjoyable.”

Gavin blushes from his collar to his hairline. “You – I don’t fuckin’ answer to you, you walking trash can!”

RK900 only smiles thinly.

* * *

Hank rolls his pen back and forth between his desk and the palm of his hand. From across the desk, Connor’s eyes track the movement, even though he’s probably also doing a million other things at the same time – kid had a thing for multi-tasking. Hank hadn’t touched his terminal in too long.

Connor’s gaze follows Hank’s, landing on Detective Reed, and his mouth thins out a little. Yeah – something’s off. Something to do with RK900, just as they had theorized. What it _is,_ exactly, eludes both of them. Even Connor, who seems to know everything about everyone. Hank hadn’t really expected him to turn into an office gossip, but even he has to admit it’s kind of cute. Harmless fun, really.

But Gavin hasn’t prodded either of them – hasn’t prodded _anyone_ – for days. It’s weird. Too out of character for him. He’s stopped giving Hank grief about his partnership with Connor, which he used to enjoy with the same kind of vindictive glee as a schoolyard bully, and he’d actually started to pull his weight around the station. Connor had been the one to clue Hank in on RK900’s staring, too – his eyes followed Gavin around like a motion sensor.

“It’s beyond the realm of being socially acceptable,” Connor informed him, face just as it always does when he thinks he’s being helpful. Hank had never really paid attention to office gossip, but he’d been needled one too many times to be anything less than smug about it.

Across the desk, Connor meets his eye. His tight-lipped little grimace softens into a smile, and he _winks_ , and Hank can’t help but chuckle.

That evening, as they return home, Connor says, “I should buy RK900 a gift, I think.”

They stop at a red light and Hank uses the opportunity to squint through the half-darkness at Connor, only to see him looking entirely genuine. “A gift? Why?”

“Because he seems to have diverted all of Detective Reed’s aggression,” Connor replies, and Hank has to admit that he’s right. “I am not sure how, exactly, but he has managed to get Detective Reed to defer to him, if not outwardly. Yet.”

 _Yet?_ Hank spares him one last glance before the light turns green. Connor’s flicking his coin around again. Thinking. “What d’you mean, _not outwardly?_ ”

“I mean that there has been a lot of nonverbal communication between them, and that Detective Reed’s work performance has increased by almost 60% in the last three days. I think… I think that RK900 has leashed him, so to speak.”

Hank can’t help but bust out laughing at Connor’s choice of words. “About fuckin’ time!” he laughs; it’s a belly-deep kind of sound that makes Connor feel all kinds of warm. “I knew Fowler just needed to team him up with someone who can kick his ass.”

“RK900 can incapacitate the average American male in 0.43 seconds,” Connor supplies.

“Thank fuck for that, then.”

They drive in silence for a while after that. Hank hits the radio and watches as they head into the sinking sun. Just when the whole issue of Reed and RK900 is beginning to slip his mind, Connor makes a little noise of revelation. It startles Hank enough to send the car swerving, but they’re on a back-street where the traffic is light.

“Hank, turn around. I know what we can get him.”

* * *

Gavin can’t stop thinking about it. Every time he _does_ think about it, his dick has the audacity to _twitch_. It’s horrific and, to be transparent, it makes him feel a little sick. Not that it stops him from jacking one out in the shower, of course, even if he does have trouble looking RK900 in the eye afterwards.

RK900. The bane of his existence; the root of all his problems. The _fucker_. Gavin imagines his stupid handsome face whenever he hits the gym, gunning it for the boxing bags. He had tried to suppress that part of his sex life for years, only for it to be violently uprooted by a fucking android, of all things. And, what’s worse, is that it overlaps with his work life. Logically, Gavin knows those two things don’t mix well, and yet –

He should’ve stopped it. He should’ve shoved the RK900 away even if it didn’t do any good – he should’ve told him no, told him to fuck off. He should’ve retained at least a sliver of his dignity. But he _hadn’t._ And for what? An immovable hand choking the life out of both his brain and his dick? It… fuck. Even when he tries to be angry about it, it’s immensely difficult. RK900’s entire countenance was as smooth and cool as his naked chassis. Gavin still remembers it vividly. He remembers what he’d done. Each time he even looks in RK900’s direction, something inside him bristles.

The worst humiliation of all is that his work is improving. Fowler’s been on his ass about it less, and they’re able to track Howard down within a matter of days. Sure, RK900 is a walking supercomputer, but Gavin has never been a bad cop, just an… _irresponsible_ one. And that’s putting it nicely.

_Why do you hate androids, Detective?_

Gavin squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head a little, as if it will rid him of the thought. It never does. It’s a question he refuses to answer – he can’t bring himself to answer it.

They track Howard down to a poor neighborhood. RK900 fills him in on the details along the way. “He knows the police,” RK900 says, and Gavin tries to focus on anything but the way his voice feels. “He knows how to play his cards right and get off lightly.”

“I know,” Gavin replies shortly, because he does. His nerves have been on edge ever since they’d gotten a location on him. Confessing it all to RK900 had been one hell of a trial; the video footage from the dismembered android had overturned parts of Gavin’s past that he really didn’t want to revisit. “He’s also a fucking coward. Rough him up some and he’ll tell us whatever we want.” He grins, knife-sharp and feral, and is aware of RK900 watching him. It’s dark out, and the only light in the car is the console and RK900’s LED.

“Be sure to leave him conscious,” RK900 says blithely.

“Hey, hey, hold on – who says _I’m_ gonna be the one to rough him up? Mr. _Literally Built To Punch Things_?”

RK900 sighs. “I was not _built to punch things_. I merely imagined you would want to.”

Gavin pauses. Shrugs. They turn down the assigned street, full of gloomy, dilapidated houses. “Well. You’re not wrong, I s’pose.” He glances at RK900 as they pull up to a boarded-up old place. He’s smiling.

The air is colder than it should be, fragrant with the promise of rain. The house doesn’t even look prepared to stand up to that sort of weather – its eaves sag and its roof already looks like it’s made of more holes than tin. Gavin wrinkles his nose. Yeah. Looks like just the place.

“Stay behind me,” he tells RK900, who complies without argument, following him closely. Gavin draws his side-arm just to be safe. RK900 doesn’t need to. Not yet. “Detroit Police, open up!”

There’s no response. Gavin waits – one beats, two. No movement. The wood of the door is soft with rot and gives easily under his heel. The house is dark and musty, and it smells like mildew and bad memories.

“I have registered three people in this house,” RK900 murmurs behind him. Gavin grits his teeth, powering up his flashlight. “All human.”

The flooring groans under their weight. Gavin’s ears are sharp – always were – but he can’t hear even a whisper of movement. There’s no way whoever’s in this house doesn’t know they’re here. Not after Gavin kicked the door in like that.

The living room is dark and empty of furniture save for an old couch. There’s a body on it, and when Gavin sweeps his light across it, the guy doesn’t move an inch. If it wasn’t for the shallow rise and fall of his chest, Gavin would’ve thought he was dead.

“Drugged,” RK900 murmurs, and Gavin half-turns to glance at him, finding his brow drawn down tight over his eyes. “Red ice. He won’t wake up any time soon.”

Gavin huffs out a relieved breath. “Leave him.”

They find the next body in the bathroom, slumped over the toilet bowl. Gavin’s light lingers on it, on the blood tracking between the tiles, on the gleam of the straight razor by the sink. “Fuck,” he mutters, and he stares until RK900 leads him away.

They find Howard, of course. He’s in one of the bedrooms, and thankfully he’s still lucid – enough, at least, to recognize Gavin. There are track marks up his arm that Gavin can see from across the room, his face sallow in a way only a red ice addict’s can be. Gavin pauses. Howard’s… changed. He’s changed and yet remains eerily familiar, like something from a murky dream.

“Fuck, Gav!” he rasps. Then he grins, and Gavin has to swallow his revulsion at the sight. “Didn’t expect you to show up. Heard you became a cop, but… wonder why it’s taken us this long.” His eyes shift, focus behind Gavin, and his grin mellows. “You got a bot, huh?”

Gavin bristles and doesn’t answer. Howard doesn’t move from where he’s slumped against the wall.

“We’re taking you to the station,” Gavin tells him, and Howard’s gaze returns to him like he doesn’t understand. “You’re connected to a string of android homicides.”

Howard laughs. He laughs and laughs and laughs, and the sound is disgusting, crawling beneath Gavin’s skin like mold. He hates it. Fucking _hates_ it. He’s always hated it. “Homicides? Is that what they are now?” His voice grows strange, slanted and quick. RK900 registers increased heartrate and a prickle of adrenaline.

Sighing, Howard holds up his wrists. “All right, officer. Slap ‘em on me.”

Gavin’s suspicious, but he holsters his gun and goes for the cuffs at his belt. In retrospect, he knows he should’ve been more careful; he of all people knew what Howard was like. But he wasn’t, and so the moment he was within arm’s reach, Howard swung at him with all the power of someone drugged up to their eyeballs. Gavin’s just thankful for his reflexes.

Gavin dodges, but even he’s no match for the strength of red ice, and when Howard lands a right hook on his jaw it has Gavin seeing stars. The entire room tilts, and out of the corner of his eye he sees Howard stagger and laugh; a shadow flickers at the edge of his vision.

“C’mon, Gav,” Howard drawls. His eyes glow inhumanly bright in the dark. “We’re buddies, right? Right?”

A hit to the gut. _Rough him up a little,_ Gavin had sneered, forgetting the kick red ice tended to give. He parries Howard’s next hit, but they come hard and fast, and visibility is near-zero. He lands a good few hits, his blood singing in absolute delight as he does so, Howard’s face moon-bright and laughing. Gavin hates his fucking face. He hates it so much.

Gavin has always been a good fighter. There’s a reason he’s always getting into dust-ups, after all – not just because he’s a bit of a jackass, though that’s definitely part of it. He’s good, but Howard’s on drugs, and he manages to land a punch right in the middle of Gavin’s solar plexus, sending the breath shooting out of his lungs. He wheezes; he can’t breathe. There’s a burly arm around his neck, then, so quickly he’d barely had time to collect his wits. Howard has him in a fucking headlock, rasping in his ear, his words incomprehensible. Gavin grits his teeth and swallows viciously as spit floods his mouth.

“Nines – !”

The pressure around his throat shifts a little. He hears Howard laugh again.

“Release the detective, please.”

Howard’s eyes roll like those of a rabid dog. He can see RK900 very clearly in the dark, the blue glint of his LED giving him away, and he spits in his direction. RK900’s lip curls very slightly. “…’re an android fucker.”

RK900 doesn’t reply. He snaps Howard’s arm in a few deft actions, moving so fast that Gavin barely sees him cross the room. Howard wails, dropping back like a sack of bricks, his arm bent at an angle that even Gavin finds a bit gruesome. He’s no idiot, though, and can see opportunity when it presents itself: a jab to Howard’s diaphragm sends him sprawling, and Gavin punches him across the face a few times just for the hell of it, not stopping until there’s blood on his knuckles. He doesn’t know if it’s his or Howard’s, but at this point he’s beyond caring.

“Detective, that’s enough.” RK900 is dragging him away, then. Gavin staggers, lets the blood flow back to his head again, and RK900 puts a hand against his back to steady him.

“Call backup,” Gavin says to the floor. “For the – the girl in the bathroom. We’ll take this sack of shit back to the station.” He spits at Howard, who cowers in the corner nursing his broken arm. He’s still laughing, and it’s a high, stressed kind of laugh that frays Gavin’s nerves. He glances at RK900 and finds that ever-blue LED flickering yellow.

RK900’s LED remains yellow for the next hour. Sometimes it cycles blue, but mostly it’s yellow, yellow, yellow. Gavin doesn’t know why and RK900 seems strangely unwilling to tell him anything. The body of the girl is removed and the other man is taken to hospital. Howard is taken by the medics as well; they’ll wait for the drugs to flush through his system before questioning him. Adrenaline grows faint and Gavin’s knuckles begin to sting. RK900 says nothing.

It’s only when they get back to the station that Gavin decides he can’t bear it anymore. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” he demands of RK900, but his voice is a little shaky, and whatever force he tries to put behind it falls flat. RK900’s ice-chip eyes find him and don’t move away again.

“You gave me a – name.”

Gavin blinks, once, twice. “What?”

“You gave me a name. You called me ‘Nines’.”

Heat fans up Gavin’s neck. “It was just – ‘RK900’ is a fuckin’ mouthful, y’know –,”

RK900 is silent and Gavin knows he’s thinking, so he tells him to cut it out, but RK900’s LED has already cycled back to blue again and Gavin is gripped by a feeling that it’s too late.

“I like it,” RK900 says, and then he smiles, and it’s not one of those thin, knife-sharp smiles – no, it’s barely-there and terribly gentle, almost like those puppy-dog smiles Connor gives Hank when he thinks nobody is looking. Gavin’s skin crawls. “Others have suggested names. They said it would make me feel more human, but none of them were right.” He pauses, LED spinning. “ _Nines_. Nine-hundred. That is interesting.”

Gavin grows pale. He’d just fucking – _named_ the thing like some sort of pet. “Look, man, I was just – it was a spur of the moment thing, y’know, I didn’t _mean_ it –,”

But he’s in too deep and he knows it. Satisfaction sits heavy on RK900’s – _Nines’s_ – face, and somehow it suits him just like every other dense expression does, makes the high ridges of his cheekbones seem even sharper, makes his eyes seem even brighter. Gavin’s heart threatens to either leap clear out of his throat or stop entirely. The tingle under his skin is a bad sign. RK900, Nines, is here, and he’d quite literally just taken Gavin’s name, and now he’s looking at him like he’s worth something and Gavin feels like he’s about to be sick.

He _had_ meant it.

He’d been calling him Nines in his head for months. It just – slipped out. He’d always imagined that RK900 would laugh at him, or mock him. But not only does he _like_ it – he had chosen it.

“You know that once you pick a name you can’t just swap it out, right?” Gavin demands, angry. He isn’t sure why he’s angry. It seems to be a cocktail of things he’d rather not think about, all boiling away in his blood. “Don’t go picking something dumb.”

RK900 opens his mouth to speak, but just as he does he seems to realize something, and his entire posture freezes. Shifts. He looks at Gavin like he _knows_ something, like he can see right through him, read him like a fucking book. His lips press thin and his eyes narrow.

They stay like that, silence pressing in around them, for longer than either of them really care to count. Eventually Gavin can no longer stand being pinned under those eyes, the longing to be pinned under _hands_ growing almost unbearable; he turns away, scrubs at his nose with the back of his sleeve, and says, “Yeah, well. Whatever. Your fault if you get stuck with a dumb fucking name.”

They’ll deal with Howard in the morning. To be honest, Gavin doesn’t have the juice to even _think_ about him right now, let alone try and interrogate him. He can feel the bruises forming under his shirt already and he just knows they’re gonna hurt like a bitch in the morning. He flips RK900 off as he leaves, desperately hoping he will follow. He tries to ignore how disappointed he is when he doesn’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> everyday i thank god for rk900 "i know i jerked you off and also fingered you that one time but no homo" nines


	7. VII

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i cant believe i fucking wrote this

“Good morning, RK900!” Connor greets him when he arrives the next morning. Connor has a need to greet him verbally that Nines still doesn’t entirely understand; Connor said that it feels more natural to him than doing it wirelessly, and Nines has decided it’s less of a conflict of interest and more of a differ in preference. He’s okay with that.

“Good morning, Connor,” he replies, nodding to the lieutenant, who lifts a hand in greeting. “Although, I must inform you that I have changed my designation to _Nines_ , and would appreciate you calling me by that name instead.”

Connor blinks, blindsided Hank chokes on his donut and gazes at him like he’s sprouted a second head. Before Nines can begin to grow concerned, however, Connor makes a delighted noise. “ _Nines –_ it has a nice ring to it. A play on words, too, in a way – I like it.”

Nines relaxes, unaware that he had been looking for approval at all, yet unable to deny how pleased it makes him even so. Hank’s busy sweeping crumbs from his desk onto the floor.

“Did you come up with that yourself?” Hank asks, noticing the quick pulse of Nines’s LED when he does.

“No. Detective Reed called me by that name last night, and I found it agreeable.”

Hank almost spits out his coffee.

“Last night?” Connor asks uneasily as Hank splutters away behind him. By the time the entendre registers in Nines’s mind, though, Connor has already deciphered it. “Oh! You went to search that house. Did you find Alex Howard?”

“We did. The detective and I plan to take him in for questioning this morning.”

They part ways after that. Hank’s coughing dies down after a few minutes and Nines can’t really understand why he had reacted so viscerally; humans still elude him, sometimes, and Hank Anderson appears to be one of the most complex individuals Nines has ever met. Connor seems to enjoy that, though, so it isn’t his place to judge. Especially not with his own interest in Gavin Reed.

Gavin shows up at the station only fifteen minutes late. He doesn’t antagonize anyone when he does, either, and Nines brings him a cup of coffee as positive reinforcement. Gavin scowls, mutters “fuck off” under his breath, and drinks it anyway.

“Shall we take Howard in for questioning?” Nines asks when Gavin is finished. Gavin has spent most of the morning trying to avoid his gaze.

“Yeah,” he grunts. “Let’s get it over with.”

Sobriety doesn’t suit Howard.

He sits there, dejected as Gavin has ever seen him, cuffed to the table and twitching every now and again from the comedown. Gavin stands in front of him, arms folded, and Nines looms over his shoulder. Howard doesn’t look at either of them; he just glares down at his wrists.

“You look like shit.”

Howard looks up, then, meets Gavin’s eye and laughs. “Cut the small talk, Gav. Listen – I’ll tell you what you wanna know. But I wanna talk to _him_.” He jerks his chin at Nines. Gavin’s eyebrows rise so high that his brow wrinkles, and then it’s _his_ turn to laugh.

“To _him_? The android? _You_?” But he shrugs, stepping aside and spreading his hands. “Well, whatever gets your rocks off.”

But Howard just stares at him, his eyes yellowed and sunken from too many drugs and not enough sleep. “Alone.”

Gavin bristles. Something doesn’t add up. Howard’s gotta be planning something –

“You may go, Detective,” Nines says, then, and Gavin glares at him. He does as he says, though, however begrudgingly, taking position behind the observation window. Each corner of the room is covered in CCTV cameras, screens showing every angle clustered around Gavin like so many staring eyes, and he gets the strange feeling that _he’s_ the one being watched.

Nines sits across the table from Howard and says nothing. He doesn’t need to.

“It’s about the droids, right?” he begins. “I was only part of one – got into some bad business with my dealers and got roped into that shit real quick. I didn’t – I didn’t _like_ it or nothin’, but my ass was on the line.”

Gavin seethes. _Liar._

“Who was with you that night?” Nines asks, his voice impossibly cool.

Howard’s lips work over his teeth, but he isn’t nervous. His posture is relaxed and he drums his fingers on the table like this is all a waste of his time. Like he hadn’t dismembered someone and harvested their blood. He looks at Nines with narrowed eyes. He _knows_ Gavin is watching – he’s been in interrogation cells like this too many times not to know how they work.

“Why don’t you ask your little bitch, huh?” Howard looks right at the mirror, then, right at _Gavin_ , whose whole brain comes to a screeching halt. Nines doesn’t even flinch. “He was one of us, once, y’know. Would still be one of us if he hadn’t fuckin’ sold us out –,”

Gavin wrenches forward from his seat, teeth grit, sweat already prickling along his hairline.

“And now he’s here brown-nosing and fuckin’ androids. Christ.” His eyes are wild as he turns them back to Nines again, his tight-lipped smile widening into a grin that opens all the weeping sores around his mouth. “You look like you could do some damage. He likes that. Used to earn us a real mint back in the day, takin’ on all the scum the regulars couldn’t handle.” He barks out a laugh and Gavin wants to be sick, wants to charge in there and beat the fucker to death. But he can’t. He can’t _move_. “Fuck. I knew the moment I saw you that you had him lickin’ your fucking boots. The slut always did love getting’ beat up some. Probably why he –,”

But Howard didn’t get a chance to finish, because Nines rose to his feet and punched him across the jaw so hard that the bone shattered. Howard crashed from his chair, knocked out cold.

Nines just… stood there. Staring at him. He was unmoving in the same way he had been after interfacing with the damaged android in that hotel, and it was the panic of seeing him like that that finally unstuck Gavin’s joints and had him on his knees, dry heaving. Somewhere in the back of his brain he was grateful that he’d overslept and didn’t have time for breakfast that morning.

Time became choppy; suddenly Nines was there, his hands firm on Gavin’s spine as he helped him to his feet, helped him to breathe. Gavin was sweating, gripped by the unbearable sensation of being covered in filth, and he couldn’t bear Nines’s hands on him at all. There was a voice, Nines’s voice, a constant bassline in his ear, in his brain, in his body. The eyes of the CCTV pressed in on him and, for the first time in a while, Gavin legitimately felt like he was going to die.

A number of things happen in the ensuing seconds.

Firstly, Nines’s processors light up with a notification that he doesn’t expect – it was something he’d stored away right at the start, when he first started at the DPD. When he first met Gavin. Those arrests that got him promoted… Nines cross-references the times and locations and manages to match them up in milliseconds. His suspicion was correct. Gavin had helped apprehend a number of high-profile drug dealers and lesser criminals, facilitating some big drug busts as well as the closing down of an illegal prostitution ring. All those arrests arose out of personal connections. No wonder he never cared to talk about it. Something sharp and strangely painful begins to knot in his circuits and, at first, Nines can’t place it, can’t find the source of it.

Sympathy. It grows hot and ugly and overwhelming.

Secondly, Gavin _grabs_ him. Holds him there like he’s afraid to let go.

Thirdly, Nines grabs him back, holds him tight, because it _feels_ like the right thing to do, the only thing to do. To hold, to comfort, to help. A single objective that manages to blind him to everything else. Gavin’s breathing is erratic; panicked. His blood pressure spikes, his vitals jumping all over the place.

“It’s all right, Gavin,” Nines tells him, his voice little more than a murmur in his ear. The vibrations filter along every nerve in Gavin’s body, and after a few minutes, he grows calm again.

“You – you just said my name,” Gavin accuses him, weakly attempting to push away. His breathing has slowed and grown even, but Nines doesn’t release him, not yet.

“Yes,” Nines replies. “Correct me if I am mistaken, but it is customary to call people by their names.”

Gavin is silent for a moment, watching him with dark, undecipherable eyes, and then he struggles to his feet again. Nines lets him. “You should go home, Detective,” he says. “This was very stressful for you.”

Gavin barks out a laugh. It’s hard and unkind. “Yeah, right. I’m a cop, tin man, this shit’s always stressful. I –,” He is interrupted by his cup of coffee, however, which he promptly throws up all over his shoes. “Fuck,” he mutters. Nines takes the opportunity to knock his knees out from underneath him and lift him clean off his feet. “Fuck! What’re you doing, you fuckin’ hunk of scrap?!”

“Taking you home,” Nines tells him flatly. “Since you seem unable to do it yourself.”

Gavin decides it’s easier on both his joints and his dignity not to complain; instead he lets his weight sag, muttering, “Just make sure Anderson doesn’t see.”

Nines chuckles. “I promise.”

They make it back to Gavin’s apartment unseen, just as Nines had promised. He emailed Fowler to let him know what happened, and that Gavin would be taking the rest of the day off. By the time they arrive at the apartment block Gavin has recovered enough to walk unaided, but he looks exhausted. He doesn’t even complain when Nines insists on walking him to his door.

He watches, curious, as Gavin greets his cat. She’s a slender, beautiful thing; Nines still remembers those eyes staring at him from under the sofa. She seems a little more open to him, now, going to rub up against his legs and curl her tail around the back of his calf. Gavin chuckles and Nines isn’t sure why.

“You, uh – want a drink? Wait, what am I – androids don’t fuckin’ drink.” Gavin scrubs his hands over his face, but Nines doesn’t blame him.

“Thank you for the offer, nonetheless,” he placates him. He’s holding the cat, now, whose name he still doesn’t know, and she’s nuzzling against his hand as he pets behind her ears. They stand there in a silence that Nines can only describe as awkward.

“I’m gonna go to bed, I think,” Gavin murmurs, already starting to peel off his shirt, which is still wet in places his regurgitated coffee had caught it on the way down. Nines is greeted by the sight of Gavin’s back, the muscles mapped by a number of mark that shimmer, silvery, in the daylight. It’s easy enough to trace their origins and how old they are, but Nines isn’t interested in that – he’s interested in how Gavin came to get them in the first place. “See yourself out whenever, I guess.”

He figures now isn’t the best time to ask.

It doesn’t… feel right to leave. Nines doesn’t entirely want to. Leaving Gavin alone after what happened at the station would likely be counter-productive, especially given that Gavin is known to be volatile and prone to self-destructive coping skills. He has learned a lot about Gavin Reed this morning.

“The fuck’re you doing?” Gavin demands when he turns to see Nines standing in the doorway of his bedroom. “I told you to leave. Don’t you have a job?”

Nines lets the sneer wash over him. “I am supervising you. From my deductions, it would be unwise to leave you alone so soon after a traumatic incident.”

Gavin pauses and glares at him. “Traumatic?” he echoes. “What, now spewing coffee all over my shoes is traumatic? Don’t be a fucking snowflake.” He turns, disgusted, kicking at the dirty laundry strewn across the floor. Irritation prickles up Nines’s spine.

“Allow me to rephrase it in a way you can understand,” he says coldly. “You had a visceral reaction to past trauma today, and from previous incidents during my time with you, I know that your coping methods are – for want of any other word – shit.”

Gavin gapes at him. It isn't enough.

“Or have you forgotten the time I caught you whoring yourself out at that bar?” It’s cruel, Nines knows that, and unnecessary. But he says it anyway, because something in him is hurting, and Gavin’s easy dismissal only makes it worse. He doesn’t like what he is feeling and has chosen to react the very same way Gavin does: with anger.

“Get the fuck out,” Gavin chokes. Nines’s sensors are flooded with the data from his rage as it grows and grows and grows, overwhelming, all-consuming. “Get the fuck out!”

Nines, his vision obscured with a red ocean of errors, leaves the apartment without so much as a word.

If Nines thought he would get peace at the station, he was sorely mistaken.

He’s still irritated about his exchange with Gavin. He calls it an exchange because he refuses – very adamantly – to call it an argument. The bullpen has been quieter recently now that Nines has gotten him under control, but he figures that having Gavin out of the office for the rest of the day would be a good opportunity to get some work done. He has a lot of information to sort through following Howard’s confession. He might have gotten more, too, if he hadn’t knocked him out in the middle of it. Nines can’t bring himself to regret it, though.

He allows thoughts of work to consuming him; the moment he reaches his desk, however, they stutter. There, sitting next to his terminal, is a nondescript box. If there hadn’t been a note tacked to it, he would have thought it was a bomb.

_We thought it might be helpful! :)_

The handwriting is font-perfect; an android’s handwriting. Nines’s eyes slide over to where Connor sits at his terminal feigning disinterest. Hank isn’t so subtle.

Against his better judgement, however, Nines lifts the lid. Inside the box is a collar and a leash.

His LED flashes red for all of a second. He matches up Connor’s note with the fact that he doesn’t have a dog, and deduces the meaning clearly. Quickly, he slams the lid back down again, and when he next looks up, he finds Connor’s eyes fixed on him. Hank has turned away to try and hide his laughter.

 _I never pinned you as the type for gag gifts,_ he tells Connor over their internal relay; Connor’s eyebrows rise and he shrugs.

_Who says it was a gag gift?_

* * *

Hank is still laughing to himself by the time they get home. “What a fuckin’ _look_ ,” he says, keys jingling as he opens the front door. Sumo is right there to greet them, as always, tripping around their legs until Connor lets him outside. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a look like that on his face.”

Connor had been delighted; Nines reacted with exactly the same bland surprise he had expected. Plus, it made _Hank_ laugh, which Connor always enjoys.

“He definitely did not expect it,” Connor agrees, and that’s the last they speak about it for a while. They shower and change, Connor makes dinner, Hank takes Sumo around the bock, and soon it’s pitch black outside and they’re sprawled on the sofa watching a telenovela.

“Hey, uh… I got you somethin’.”

Connor looks up from where his head rests on Hank’s shoulder. “You got me something?”

(It’s another cute habit Connor’s picked up – repeating questions like that. Hank knows it should annoy him, and if it was anyone other than Connor it _would_ annoy him, but it doesn’t. It’s just… endearing, like the rest of him).

Hank rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah. It’s not really a present, but –,”

Connor sits up straight, and it reminds Hank of when Sumo was a puppy presented with treats. “Can I see it?”

 _No turning back now, Anderson_.

The telenovela drones on, forgotten, as Hank leads Connor to their bedroom. “Close your eyes,” he tells Connor like CyberLife didn’t spend millions of dollars on making him able to function perfectly fine without them, but Connor does it anyway, standing there neatly and positively thrumming with anticipation.

Hank feels a bit stupid, to be honest. He’d felt a bit stupid buying the damn thing, too, and he felt a bit stupid whenever he thought about it. He’s fifty-three, for Christ’s sake – he’s too old for this shit. Some part of him wondered if he’d every have the balls to actually bring it out of the closet, and it’s a wonder Connor hadn’t found it already. He goes to Connor, holding his breath deep in his lungs, and stands in front of him.

“Okay, you can… uh. You can look now.”

Connor looks down at the box Hank holds in his hands. “Oh.”

At first he wonders if it’s a gag gift, like the one they had gotten Nines – but a scan tells him it isn’t. The leather is too fine, the shape made to fit a human neck. His lean shoulders twitch at the thought, and it takes him a few seconds longer than it should to raise his eyes back to Hank’s.

“Is it for me?” It comes out as a whisper, feather-light. Hank’s face creases in uncertainty, and Connor is riddled with the urge to kiss it away.

“I thought – yeah. I mean, when we were gettin’ that gift for RK and all, I – when I was younger it was kinda trendy to - so I thought - Christ, this is so creepy. We didn’t even talk about this and I just – we should have talked about this.” Hank’s backpedaling fast, but Connor is faster, catching his forearms in his hands before he can turn away.

“Put it on me.”

Hank blinks, pauses. “Huh?”

Again, Connor insists. “Put it on me, Hank. I want to wear it.”

 _Fuck_ , Hank thinks. The sheer sincerity in Connor’s eyes is enough to mesmerize him. His face is tight with it. Hank’s doubts have no traction there.

So he does. Connor turns and Hank passes his hand along that pale, swanlike neck, marveling at just how perfectly it fits into his palm. Connor practically purrs at the touch, easing his weight back against Hank’s body. Hank kisses each jut of his spine, each mole, mouths along Connor’s hairline and behind his ear as he slips the collar around his throat. Connor delights at the sensory feedback from the leather and the metal. Hank fits it just a little tight, so that each shift of Connor’s weight makes the buckle dig into his skin. Impulsively, he retracts the skin around the collar to better feel it against the sensors of his chassis. Hank notices and chuckles.

“What’re you up to now?” he asks, his hands rough where they pass up and down Connor’s sides, thumbs lingering at the dimples just above his waistband.

“I wanted to feel it better,” Connor murmurs. “My chassis is more sensitive when exposed.”

If Hank wasn’t half-hard before, he sure is now.

“You’re gonna be the death of me, you know that?” he grouses, and Connor smiles over his shoulder.

“Actually, your most concerning co-morbidity is currently –,” He doesn’t get the chance to finish, though, not when Hank kisses him so deeply, his huge hand coming to lie over the collar around Connor’s throat. His other hand slips up under Connor’s shirt, following the taut line of his navel, skirting around the indent of his pump regulator, pressing against his chest. He doesn’t stop until Connor’s moaning into his mouth and sucking on his tongue like CyberLife’s greatest shame.

“Easy there,” Hank mumbles against Connor’s soft mouth. “Or I might start thinkin’ you really are a puppy.”

Connor shivers. Hank’s never been into the whole pet play thing, and it’s been decades since he last broke out the leather, but he can’t deny that having Connor in a collar turns him on like little else. Besides – Connor had been compared to an eager little dog many times before, including self-reference, so it isn’t really that big of a stretch. That’s what Hank tells himself, at least.

“I can be, if you want.” Connor gazes at him from beneath his lashes, playing him like a champ, but Hank only chuckles and shakes his head.

“Nah,” he rumbles, kissing Connor’s lips one last time before turning him around and grabbing at his ass. “Just be Connor. That’s enough for me.”

Connor has a soft spot for the romantic shit, something Hank learned very quickly; he always finds it a bit embarrassing, but knowing how much Connor enjoys it makes him try a bit harder to indulge him, to get him flowers for no reason, to whisper sweet nothings a bit more often. This, though… it’s true. The best thing Connor could ever be is Connor.

Hank loops his forefinger through the little metal ring of the collar and tugs. “Kinky little android,” he accuses, and Connor – the brat – only smiles coquettishly at him. He pushes against Hank’s chest and sends him sprawling out on the bed, quickly divesting them of their clothes. Having Connor kneeling between his legs and moaning against his dick in a _collar_ has got to be one of the hottest fucking things Hank has ever seen. He almost passes out just from the sight of it.

Connor mouths along the thick shaft for a few minutes, taking his time and wallowing in the sensation. He kisses the head wetly, his lips flushed and slick with spit, looking up at Hank from beneath lowered lashes because he knows it drives Hank wild. Hank cards a hand through Connor’s hair, more than content to lie there with such a pretty mouth nursing his cock. It’s enough to make him hard, but not enough to make him cum, and whenever his belly tightens with need, Connor drops to tongue at his balls instead. Hank will never understand why the kid loves it so much – as much as Connor insists the contrary, Hank considers himself to be old and washed-out and entirely undesirable. Like this, though… with the way Connor looks at him, the way he reveres him with his hands and his mouth – it’s hard not to feel wanted, even for Hank.

“Good boy,” he rumbles. Connor, pleased, takes Hank’s cock into his mouth, sinking down until the whole thing is in his throat. The channel grips, massages like nothing Hank ever thought was possible, and he tips his head back with a groan. The collar comes in use; Hank yanks Connor off his dick by the metal ring, frowning when Connor grins at him.

“Don’t gotta look so fuckin’ pleased with yourself,” he grumbles, taking Connor’s chin into his hand and turning his face this way and that, like he’s appraising him. Hank sits up, tugs the collar roughly enough to force a little bitten-off choke out of Connor’s throat, and kisses him.

“Fuck me,” Connor murmurs against his mouth, licking at Hank’s lips, chasing them. He mouths along the line of Hank’s bearded jaw, then, and Hank chuckles at his eagerness. “Please, Hank –,”

Roughly, Hank yanks Connor’s head away. Connor is still sitting on his knees between Hank’s legs, looking up at him with those deep, wondrous eyes, face rapt with attention. His body is flushed pink with need, his cock painfully hard against his hip. Hank glances down at it. “Slow down, sweetheart. We’ve got all night.” He kisses Connor gently. “Tell me what you want, baby.”

Connor shivers, his breath coming harder as his systems begin to really heat up. He licks his lip, eyes Hank’s cock, and all but begs. “Fuck me, please, fuck –,” He swallows, then, as if something’s stuck in his throat, and climbs up into Hank’s lap until his cock is pressed against his belly. Mouth against Hank’s ear, he breathes, “I want you to breed me, Lieutenant.”

It’s a low blow, even for Connor – saying something like that _while_ pulling rank? It’s downright criminal and nearly gives Hank a heart attack from how quickly it shoots to his dick. He groans, pained, and digs his nails into Connor’s hips.

“Fuck,” he grunts. “And here I was tryin’ to play nice.” Without waiting for a reply – he knows it’d be a smartass response, anyway – he lifts the body from his lap and tosses it further up onto the bed. Connor makes a surprised but delighted noise in the back of his throat, spreading his legs eagerly as Hank climbs up over him. “Nuh-uh, sweetheart. You want me to fuck you like a bitch –,” Connor gasps sharply as Hank flips him onto his front, lifting his hips with one hand and forcing his head down with the other. Typical – Connor’s hole is already wet and soft, swallowing Hank’s fingers easily. Christ, Connor looks like a five-course meal spread out for him like this, and if Hank doesn’t get his dick in that gorgeous, warm body in the next five seconds, he might just finally kick the bucket.

He fucks into Connor in a single, bruising stroke. Connor absolutely _howls._

Hank laughs. “That’s right,” he grunts, gripping Connor’s neat little waist and fucking him in an utterly relentless volley. It’s been a while since they’ve fucked like this – little wonder, given Hank’s old bones – but damn if it isn’t worth it every time. Connor clutches at the sheets like they’re the only stable thing in the world, a blush spreading down over his shoulders, his fans whirring even despite the air he’s pulling in. Lifting a hand, Hank reaches to Connor’s neck and curls his fingers around the collar, using it to pull Connor back until his spine is arched and he’s choking for breath.

“Ha – _Hank_ – Ha _aaank_ –,”

It’s Hank’s favorite song.

He fucks Connor hard and fast and _deep_ , so deep, reveling in the wet noises rising from their bodies, the soft give of Connor’s hole, the warbling birdsong of Connor’s moans. He’s beyond words, beyond begging, his voice beginning to glitch as it does whenever his body is under immense stress.

“Fuck, Connor – !” Hank leans over him, his hands pressed flat against Connor’s scapulae, pounding him down into the bed.

“Hank, c – inside me – ! Inside!” Connor can barely speak for the pleasure (and the fact that his face is mostly mashed into the mattress), but Hank hears it, and he lets out a furious sound. Something inhuman takes hold and he pounds his hips down, harder, harder, _harder_ , until Connor can do little more than wail and cum hard without even touching his cock.

Hank smothers Connor with his body, his hips grinding deep in the moments leading up to his release. His shout is muffled in Connor’s hair, against his neck, the metal of the collar unbearably warm where it digs into his chin. Connor sobs underneath him, his hole fluttering around Hank’s cock, milking him for all he’s worth.

“Fuck,” Hank puffs, just lying there. He’s beyond movement. He’s beyond comprehensible thought.

Below him, Connor’s fans go dead.

Hank has learned not to panic when that happens, especially not after he’d just pounded the poor boy into the next dimension. Groaning, he lifts himself off Connor’s body and pulls out – the sight of Connor’s soft, wet hole so fucked open and – Christ almighty – _leaking_ Hank’s spend might have gotten him hard again if he was 15 years younger. As it is, though, Hank doesn’t have it in him to get it up again this quick, not even for Connor. He rolls off him, gives him some air, makes sure he can breathe and cool his systems again. Hank lies next to Connor, just watching him as he comes to, and when Connor’s eyes open again Hank is the first thing he sees.

It’s the way he wants it to be whenever he needs to reboot. He’d told Hank so. _I want you to be there. The first thing I want to see is you._

“Welcome back,” Hank murmurs, stroking his fingers down Connor’s face. Connor hums happily. “Enjoy yourself?”

“Immensely,” Connor replies, and Hank is proud that his voice is still a bit crooked. He leans over and kisses him, hands moving to unbuckle the collar. “Wait –,” Connors hand clasp his, moving them away, and he offers Hank an abashed little smile. “I would like to wear it a little longer.”

Hank didn’t think it was possible for him to be any more in love with Connor. Looks like he’d been wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i have this fuckin uh...... shitfight collection of hcs for gavin's past, and i'm aware they most likely don't make much sense at this point, and probably will continue to be confusing. so if you have any questions or need anything clarified, leave me a comment and i'll gladly fill u in!
> 
> gavin's past is, for me, largely inspired by detroit: evolution bc i think it's an ingenious piece of work and wanted to pay it homage somehow (also i like their take on gavin uwu). it does differ in some respects, however.


	8. VIII

Gavin knows he shouldn’t stew. He knows it’s bad for him. He does it anyway, though, because he doesn’t deserve to do anything that _isn’t_ bad for him, as far as he’s concerned. He just lies in his bed in a state of half-wakefulness until his cat assaults him for food.

He’d be lying to himself if he said he wasn’t hurt. To hear Nines call him a _whore_ , however inadvertently, hurt. Past Gavin would’ve laughed at him for getting his feelings sucker-punched by an android, but whatever. Gavin’s beyond caring at this point.

And yet – Nines was _angry_. Gavin’s dismissal had pissed him off, made him say something cruel, and he takes a certain pride in that. He can still see Nines’s face, even now, bright with anger. It’s probably the most emotional he’s ever seen Nines get, and it’s thrilling. His dick takes particular interest whenever he chooses to play back the memory.

He calls off sick the next day, too. He can’t face Nines or Howard. He knows it’s cowardly, but he just – needs to catch a break. Needs to collect himself again. Needs to get his fucking _dick_ under control whenever he imagines Nines’s body going taut with anger, whenever he remembers the way he spat out the words. Shit, he’s always been this way – he’s always found pleasure in the wrong things. He’s strung up between arousal and misery, tick-tocking between one and the other, and it’s torturous.

The last thing he expects that evening is to find that very same RK900 standing at his door, face just as frustratingly impassive as ever.

Nines’s olive branch comes in the form of Thai take-out, which he places in Gavin’s kitchen, eyes surveying the mess. Only then does Gavin realize he hasn’t eaten in two days.

“I wanted to apologize for what I said yesterday,” Nines tells him, hands folded neatly on the countertop. He doesn’t _look_ sorry, Gavin thinks, but then again, he never really looks anything much. “It was unnecessary of me.”

Sighing, Gavin flops down on the couch, kicking his feet up onto the coffee table purely because he knows it’ll piss Nines off. “Yeah, well. It’s not like you were wrong.” He’s ashamed of it, but there’s no point lying – not to himself and not to Nines. There’s no point being angry at the truth.

Nines doesn’t move. Gavin, somehow, musters up the courage to look at him. There’s that tightness again – it’s always centered right between Nines’s brows, and if he was human Gavin would tell him he’d get wrinkles. But he won’t get wrinkles, because he’s an android, forever doomed to be perfect. Bastards.

“I know I’ve got a lot of bad habits,” Gavin mutters. “Just – don’t worry about ‘em.” His glare is weak. “Stop fuckin’ – worrying about me.”

Nines’s frown deepens. “I’m afraid I can’t do that. You’re my partner. Your wellbeing is in my best interests.”

Christ, it’s exactly what he’d expect an android to say. Logical and devoid of any emotional intelligence whatsoever. Gavin hates it.

“Maybe I _want_ to do this shit,” Gavin spits. Nines’s easy patience pisses him off. “Maybe I wanna get fucked raw in some filthy alley by a guy I don’t know. You ever think of that? Of course not, you fuckin’ _prick_.”

The tendons in Nines’s neck shift only slightly. His eyes drop to Gavin’s feet on the coffee table and his mouth twitches. Gavin smirks.

“I didn’t ask to be paired up with you, okay?” Gavin continues with the glee of a child prodding a hornets’ nest. “Didn’t ask for it, didn’t want it. _Still_ don’t want it, actually, ‘specially not when it turns out you seem to like nagging me more than doing your fucking j _ob_ –,” Gavin’s voice arcs as Nines closes the distance between them, fisting his hand in Gavin’s hair and all but dragging him from the couch. He’s on the floor in moments, his body singing with delight at the weight of Nines’s shoe pressing his cheek to the carpet.

“You’re incredibly transparent,” Nines tells him. Gavin tries to get free, but Nines has him pinned. “You could have asked, you know. There was no need to try and aggravate me.” And yet, Nines has come to understand something about Gavin and his constant antagonizing; his needling is usually done for attention. A schoolyard bully. Most people stonewalled it (like Hank), others met it with head-on aggression (like Fowler), but nobody had offered Gavin any proper resistance. He’s never had any true discipline – a write-up from HR or a scrape-up in an alley certainly isn’t what Gavin is looking for.

“There’s no fun in that,” Gavin says into the carpet, grunting when Nines rolls him onto his back with a sharp kick to the shoulder. He eyes the bruises over Gavin’s ribcage. Then he sees the growing bulge in his sweats, and any concern is quickly dissipated.

“Shut up.” Nines keeps his foot on Gavin’s shoulder, right over his clavicle, and the agony of a snapped bone dangles just out of reach. “This isn’t about you, Reed. You never pause to consider the affects your actions have on others. Since I was assigned as your partner, your solve rate has increased by over 40%. You have closed twice as many cases within the last month than you did last year. The DPD knows I am an asset – they will keep me. You?” He allows a pause and smiles thinly, cruelly. Gavin’s heart pounds at a sprint. “Well. You’re expendable.”

Gavin’s cock strains at his sweats, but he can’t move. Again Nines appraises him, then the shoe on his shoulder drags a rough line from his shoulder to his hip, moving to press his cock down between his legs. Gavin groans and flexes his hips up.

“I have told you this before: I know what you need. Your performance determines whether or not I give it to you. By your attitude –,” He grinds his foot down and Gavin chokes on a whine, “ – I assume you don’t.”

Gavin mutters something; the sound is caught against his teeth, but he knows Nines heard it from the cut of the smirk across his mouth.

“Pardon?” Nines asks anyway. Gavin glowers up at him. “I didn’t catch that.”

“I – I want it.” Heat creeps down into his face, seeping ever lower and dusting every part of him with blush. He shifts his hips again, just to get the message across, though he leaves the venom in his voice for the sake of his dignity. Nines has the gall to look surprised.

“What do you want?”

Gavin can barely breathe. His heartbeat is centered in his skull and it takes all his focus not to start rutting. “I want – I want you to –,” He can’t say it. He _can’t._ Sweat prickles along the back of his neck. The shame lances up through his guts, as painful as it is arousing. Nines puts more weight against his dick, presses until Gavin’s throat seizes in pain.

“Say it.”

And then the words tumble from Gavin’s mouth as if he’d vomited them. “F-fuck me –,”

The sight of Nines’s satisfaction is so – Gavin doesn’t know what it is. It makes him feel some kind of way, but he isn’t sure what kind of emotion it is, or if it’s even an emotion at all. His brain doesn’t seem to be working right. It never seems to work right around Nines.

“Good,” Nines says, very quietly, and realization hits Gavin like a freight train.

Praise. Fucking _praise_. He wants – he wants Nines to praise him. To tell him he did a good job. To fix him with that satisfied little look that borders on _pride_. He squashes the thought as soon as it surfaces. He’ll deal with that shit later. He hates it. He hates it so much. He wants Nines to be proud of him.

The foot lifts from his dick and Gavin only has a moment to lament it – Nines’s hand is back in his hair, dragging him to his knees. He cups Gavin’s chin in one hand, and the touch is disarmingly gentle. He has that same considering expression on his face, and Gavin can tell he’s doing that weird preconstruction thing again.

“You did well apprehending Howard,” Nines says, stroking his thumb along Gavin’s jaw. “And, I admit, I pity you. Since I’m feeling charitable, I will give you something nice.”

Gavin swallows thickly. _Nice_ could go both ways with Nines.

“I’ll let you fellate me.” Nines is closer, now, half-stooped over where Gavin kneels on the carpet. “So long as you ask nicely.”

Gavin swallows again. His mouth floods with saliva and his dick is so hard it hurts. He feels – empty. Imagines Nines fucking him five ways from Sunday, and that’s a mistake, because the very thought of it punches the most pathetic whine from Gavin’s throat. He wants it, he wants – everything.

“Let me – can I – ?” His hands are already reaching for Nines’s fly, his face scrunched up in need.

Whatever Nines was expecting, it certainly wasn’t that. Gavin looks fucked-out already and he hasn’t even been _touched_. His reactions are, as far as Nines is concerned, exquisite. He would be quite happy teasing Gavin along like this for hours. He shoves Gavin’s hands away.

“ _Ask._ ”

Shame is a beautiful look on him, Nines decides. It might be his favorite, actually. Gavin manages a weak, humiliated glower, chews on his lips until they’re red and swollen, and Nines almost kisses him. Almost. “I – let me suck you off, _please_ –,”

A thrill pulses through Nines’s system. He takes his hand away from Gavin’s face and goes to the sofa, sitting down and spreading his thighs. There’s an unmistakable bulge in the front of his slacks; Gavin’s eyes are fixed on it.

“That wasn’t there a second ago,” he says, his wits briefly shocked back into him. Nines can’t help but smirk, though there’s a softness to it.

“I have the ability to divert various processes,” he explains. “Such as indicating an erection. Technically, it was always there, but you are only seeing it now.”

Gavin wheezes. “Holy _shit_.”

“If you take too long, I might decide to take care of it myself.”

The threat is enough to have Gavin scrambling. He crawls between Nines’s legs, his fingers shaking at his fly. Nines doesn’t react the same way a human would – he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t make a noise – but by this point Gavin isn’t particularly surprised. He also isn’t surprised by the monster Nines is hiding in his jeans.

“Fuck,” Gavin moans. It’s a perfect mimicry of the real deal, perfectly matched to Nines’s skin tone. It’s… eerily accurate. Big, pale, perfect. Through the haze currently occupying his head, Gavin thinks about what it would be like to sink down on it, and his organs lurch with the lust that thought procures. “Fuck.”

Nines breathes deeply through his nose. His components are beginning to grow warm. Gavin’s face grows dark, his eyes wide and black with need, and he lets out a breathy little sigh between taking the head between his lips.

“Good,” Nines murmurs, petting Gavin’s hair, stroking his fingers over the whorl of his ear. “If you do a good job, I might see fit to reward you.”

Gavin doesn’t need to be told twice. To be honest, having Gavin’s mouth on his cock would have done Nines in anyhow, but it’s immensely pleasing to see Gavin scramble to follow orders. _His_ orders. And oh, how he does – Nines learns very quickly that Gavin knows how to work his mouth. Within minutes he’s taking Nines down to the root, spit sluicing between chin and hip, eyes red. Each time he gags, Gavin’s throat convulses almost painfully tight around Nines’s cock, and the gentle hand in his hair fists tight at his scalp. At the feel of it there, Gavin pulls off, and the noise it makes is heinous.

“Fuck my mouth,” Gavin slurs. It takes Nines a second to process. Gavin’s mouth is back on his dick, then, and any urge to treat him gently flees. Tightening his grip, Nines fucks up into Gavin’s throat, making him wince and gag loudly. It’s wet and terribly messy, and usually Nines would be horrified, but he just… can’t be. Not when there’s electricity fizzing along each wire, each minute cable. Gavin just sits there on his knees, gazing at Nines through bleary eyes like he’s the most incredible thing in the world, as Nines drags his mouth up and down his cock.

“Gavin,” Nines grits out as an explosion of current shoots up the line of his back; the sensation penetrates deeper than anything he has ever felt before, and he’s _coming_ , spilling deep into Gavin’s throat. He pulls out, lets Gavin lick away whatever’s left, and tries to come to terms with what just happened.

“I – did I – ?”

Nines takes Gavin’s face into his hands and strokes it with reassuring fingers. “You did an excellent job.”

“Please –,” Gavin’s own cock is so hard it’s flushed almost purple. Even to Nines it looks painful. His face gives away so many things. It floods Nines’s sensors with the most delicious information, registering a constellation of different emotions, shimmering and ever-changing. He could read into Gavin’s face forever. “Please fuck me –,”

It’s choked-out, high, pathetic. Nines smiles thinly. He could break Gavin Reed apart so easily, he thinks; he knows exactly how he would do it. He’s planned it out hundreds – even thousands – of times. How he would wear Gavin down until he’s capable of little more than shivering and making those lovely, broken sounds, driven to the worst depths of his desires. It’s so… raw. Honest. _Vulnerable_. Nines wonders if this is how humans feel to be drunk.

“No.”

The reply throws Gavin for a loop. He groans, bites at the leg of Nines’s trousers like a dog, gnashing the weave between his teeth. He shuffles forward on his knees until his cock is caught between his belly and Nine’s shin, his hips flexing, slick smearing all over the fabric. His sneer glimmers, smug, teeth strangely sharp for a human.

But Gavin has been good. So good. So Nines lets him rut, leans down again and speaks in his ear, stroking those long fingers across the bunching muscles of his shoulders. “Something interesting came into my possession today,” he murmurs. “A collar and a leash. Fitting, don’t you think?” Fingers press just hard enough over Gavin’s trachea, right where the collar would sit, and Gavin slurs out something Nines can’t register. “I should leash you, Reed. You strike me as the sort of person who would appreciate that.”

Gavin can’t look at him for the shame. He presses his face into Nines’s thigh and humps his leg, so far gone with lust that he doesn’t fucking _care_ about his pride anymore. Eyes glassy yet utterly _fixated_ on the set of Nines’s face. It’s beyond handsome, now, gleaming in the low light, eerily perfect and unmoving. It’s so fucking – _weird_ , inhuman, and Gavin can’t get enough of it. The weight of Nines’s cock is imprinted against the inside of his throat like a memory, the weight of his fingers flush against the outside. A fucking _collar_. Gavin is nothing more than a dog to him. A base, instinct-driven creature in need of command. He heaves something dangerously close to a sob as nausea climbs inside his ribs. This – this kind of thing is a secret. _His_ secret, the kind of shit he’d swore to take to the grave, but now his android partner is here filling out every dark facet of Gavin’s dreams like he was _made_ for it. Those ice-chip eyes never leave him. Nines barely reacts, just looks down his nose the same way he did the first time, like Gavin is the scum of the earth.

He doesn’t make a single noise when he comes. It’s all caught in a messy tangle somewhere between his lungs. It hurts. He glares up at Nines through the tears and _hates_ him while falling deeply, deeply in love.

Nines strokes his hair, his face, hushing him. “Good,” he murmurs, and the cadence of his voice washes over the clammy flush of Gavin’s body like water. Gavin wants to do nothing more than collapse, but his joints are frozen, and he’s _crying_ , sobbing ugly into Nines’s thigh. The knot of shame and anger and hatred – for Nines, for his life, for _himself_ – comes pouring out between his teeth. It’s black and bitter just like it always it. “Breathe, Gavin. It’s all right.”

Eventually Gavin grows calm again. His muscles unlock and he slumps between Nines’s legs, nearly catatonic. When Nines moves, he just… lets it happen. Doesn’t fight it. He lets Nines clean him up, check him over, help him to bed. His body is numb, and that numbness allows him to ignore the nausea gnawing away at his stomach, at least for a little while, at least for now.

“Do you need anything?” The words come echoing through the dark, cavernous in the strange way Nines’s voice always is, as if he’s speaking from multiple places in the room at once.

It takes Gavin great effort to lift his eyes and glare at him. Something very hot itches along his spine. Shame? No – it’s sharper, more penetrating. Shame is there too, of course, gripping every fiber in his being like it’s trying to rip him limb from limb. It becomes so overwhelming that he can’t stand to look at Nines anymore, choosing to turn his back instead.

Something grapples at Nines, too. A feeling. He isn’t entirely used to those, yet. This isn’t a _good_ feeling. It grows alarmingly quickly, swelling and consuming like some kind of cancer, firing off all sorts of negative signals he doesn’t know how to mitigate. His LED glows yellow in the dark, and he turns, leaving Gavin to wallow alone.

When he returns home again, Nines goes straight from his threshold to the small closet at the back of the bedroom. He stares at the doors for a moment before opening them; an unnecessary lag that might be worrying if his CPU wasn’t so busy processing other things. The closet is occupied by a jacket that Nines has yet to wear, a few shirts, and a pair of trousers or two. Androids don’t sweat or shed like humans do, so the need for laundry is reduced, and Nines has found an odd preference for soft black sweaters and expensive leather. The materials of finely made clothes are very pleasing to him, a sentiment many androids have expressed since they began dressing themselves. He thinks of Connor, briefly, and how his own sense of fashion had been influenced so strongly by Lieutenant Anderson (much to Nines’s chagrin). Unlike the lieutenant, however, Connor manages to make it look suave.

But this isn’t about Connor. It isn’t about Nines’s clothes. This is about the small box tucked away into the back corner of his closet – the box Nines couldn’t bring himself to throw away. He should have, he knew. But he didn’t.

His preconstruction subroutine is flooded with the possibilities of what lies within that box. Of Gavin punching Nines square across the jaw in offense. Gavin, leashed like a furious dog. Gavin, ashamed and painfully aroused, licking the seam of Nines’s shoe. Electricity surges centrally and Nines tries to focus. It is… immensely difficult.

What he had felt looking down at Gavin’s turned back – it was almost annoyance, but softer, something he felt far deeper. It was an error that persisted no matter how he tried to fix it. Hurt, perhaps. Nines prefers not to think about it. He shuts the closet and goes into stasis without doing any of the things he usually would beforehand. Deep stasis – enough for his system to go black.

* * *

Gavin doesn’t return to work the next day. He tells himself he still feels like shit, but truthfully, he only skives off because he might be sick if he has to look at Nines again so soon. What had happened… it was a lot to unpack. He isn’t ready. He probably won’t _ever_ be ready to face shit like that. Perhaps moping around is a bad idea – it leaves too much room for introspection, really – but Gavin isn’t in the mood to think about shit like that. He just wants to roll around and feel sorry for himself.

He considers texting Nines just to let him know he’s okay (because the big bastard _worries_ about him, God know why) but he decides against it, eventually. That would be swerving way closer to caring than Gavin is particularly willing to get. Instead, he eats leftover Thai food and spends the most part of the day watching reruns of shitty soaps from the 2010s. His cat watches him from her position on the kitchen counter the whole time and doesn’t scream at him once.

A very particular discomfort rolls around his diaphragm. He can’t seem to dislodge it any more than he can source it. He _refuses_ to touch his dick again, knowing that he’ll end up conjuring back memories of what happened the night before, and when thinking about it makes that discomfort grow, he knows that he has to find some way to blank out. Replace those memories with new ones; overwrite them completely.

It's a long shot, but he’s feeling shitty.

By the time he drags himself off the couch it’s late in the evening. He doesn’t bother showering or eating anything; there’s no point trying to feel better when he knows it won’t work. He puts out some cat food, tops up the water, grabs his keys, and leaves without even turning off the lights. He isn’t like Anderson – he doesn’t need to get shitfaced to make bad decisions. His moral compass was knocked way off way back. All he needs is panic.

And he’s panicking now, in a weird sort of way, sweating inside his jacket even though the night is balancing on bitterly cold; the air in the car is too close, stiflingly hot, and he briefly entertains the thought of swerving into traffic. It’s gone as soon as it comes. Gavin’s too fucking spiteful for that. It’s a quiet kind of panic that washes over him in warm, lapping waves. He hates it. He _hates_ it.

The bar he goes to is just far enough away that he can stay unnoticed just like they always are. Even in situations like these – when his head feels like it’s screwed on sideways – Gavin isn’t _stupid_. Because despite the fact that it’s already 20-fucking-39, guys like him still end up beaten to death in alleyways, and like _hell_ if he’s gonna go out like that. He’s still sweating when he gets to the bar, and the guy behind it eyes him warily just like they always do. His concern is no match for the twenty Gavin slaps down on the bar, though, and he gets his shot without complaint. It takes another three before he feels himself again.

The dive is hardly a gay leather bar, that’s for sure, but the patrons are more or less the same. Similar enough for Gavin. His pride won’t let him wander someplace safe – it’s here or nowhere.

Above it all, he thinks of Nines. Of the disappointment, the disgust. It makes his dick twitch.

“You okay?” asks a voice to his left, and Gavin lifts his face against the light to see someone much taller, much broader, and much older than him looming against the neon. “You look a little strung-out.”

Gavin waves dismissively. “Nah. Just stressed.” Then he laughs. The sound is brassy and unfamiliar to his ears. “Okay, yeah. I might be a bit keyed up. It’s been a while since I –,” He makes a suggestive little gesture and is rewarded with a deep, bellowing laugh.

The guy buys him a drink. Introduces himself by a name Gavin forgets five minutes later. They chat for a few minutes before the guy puts his hand on the back of Gavin’s neck and Gavin _shivers_ , because it’s heavy and callused in all the ways he likes.

Nines’s fingers aren’t like that, though. They’re thin and spidery, almost like they’re too long for his hands, nimble where human hands are clumsy. Gavin’s thoughts wander to those fingers, to how they’d felt inside him in the back of that cab. Fingers that don’t look strong, but that had broken a man’s arm with little more than a twist.

Gavin shudders at the memory. The man beside him quirks an eyebrow in interest, and Gavin fixes him with wet, needing eyes.

“Come on,” the man says, his tone allowing no argument. Gavin gladly lets himself be led away.

The back room would have been better, but the bathroom isn’t so bad. It’s cleaner than a lot of the bathrooms he’s found himself in before. He’s on his knees, fumbling with the guy’s belt, feeling the firmness of the bulge beneath his hands. The moment his fly is open, Gavin is overwhelmed by the headiness of it, drowning in the hoarse laugh from above. Hands finds his hair, gripping it and angling his face, and Gavin can just sit there on his knees and be used.

He hates how desperate he is. He swallows down the stranger’s cock before it’s even half-hard, tonguing at it, sucking at the heavy balls below. It isn’t enough. He feels sick. His dick is limp and his guts are on fire and he wants to cry for reasons he can’t seem to source. Leaning back, he lets the now-hard shaft fall from his lips, rocking back on his heels to fix his eyes upon the man above him.

“Fuck my mouth,” he rasps.

Hands knot in his hair, tight against his skull. His jaw aches, drool slopping down his chin and onto his shirt. The back of his throat burns as it’s fucked again and again and again, tightening whenever he gags.

He hates Nines. Fucking _hates_ him. Rage boils hot in his throat and he can’t keep the image of Nines standing over him, disgusted, out of his mind. He recalls the collar. The leash. The way Nines’s expression crumpled when Gavin was sucking him off. Nines. Fucking stupid android Terminator. He wonders if Nines would ever fuck his mouth like this – if he’d ever hold him down and take what he wanted.

Gavin groans, his nose mashed against the stranger’s hip. Cum drags heavy and bitter down his throat.

“Fuck,” the guy rasps, pulling out of Gavin’s mouth. There’s a heavy sort of silence that always follows these kinds of liaisons – post-orgasm clarity sets in, and Gavin’s hook-up remembers their spouse or whatever, scurrying away like they’d been caught in a crime. This guy isn’t that bad; he ruffles Gavin’s hair, chuckles, and shoves himself back into his jeans. He doesn’t offer to help Gavin get off. Doesn’t offer anything except a “thanks, bud” before he’s gone, and Gavin is left on his knees in the bathroom stall feeling like he’d just puked his guts up.

There’s no catharsis in this, he thinks. He remembers Howard, how he’d told Nines all that shit. The fucker knew what he was doing. Gavin thinks of Nines, he always thinks of Nines – hard-faced and impenetrable, _made_ to intimate, made to dominate.

Gavin can’t remember leaving the bar. The air bites at him as he stands on the curb with a half-hard dick and a face wet with both spit and tears. It’s awful and he _feels_ awful and a part of him wishes Nines had been there to wrench him away like last time. He fishes his phone out of his pocket and stares at it, hard, for longer than he cares to admit. The alcohol has started to ebb, reality looming just out of sight, a pressure on the back of his tongue. His fingers move before his mind does, unlocking his phone. Fucking traitors.

He calls Nines before he can convince himself not to. His brain catches up a second later, though, and he hangs up, hating himself even more for it. _Fucking coward_ , he admonishes himself. Defeated, Gavin sits down on the curb and watches the traffic, counting cars to keep his mind off other things. Worse things. He isn’t sure how long he sits there.

“Detective Reed.”

This – he’s gotta be fucking dreaming. Gavin is so certain he’s hearing things that he doesn’t even bother reacting.

“Detective Reed, are you all right?” It’s closer this time – almost directly behind him. Gavin turns, waiting for the illusion to fall away, but it doesn’t. There’s Nines, right fucking _there_ , lit from behind by the soft glow of the dive bar, looking just the same as always. Gavin wishes he had a cigarette.

“The fuck’re you doing here?” he demands, his voice hoarse. It doesn’t escape Nines’s notice.

“You called me before,” Nines explains. “Given the abruptness and time of the call, as well as everything else that has happened recently, I thought it would be prudent to check on you.”

Gavin is silent. Glaring. He turns his back on Nines and busies himself watching cars again. As predicted, Nines appears beside him – what Gavin had _not_ predicted, however, was Nines lowering himself onto the curb beside him and watching the cars as well. They sit like that for a while, in silence, before Nines produces a half-empty pack of Marlboros. He hands them to Gavin.

“The fuck did you get these?”

Nines looks a little sheepish, if such a thing was even possible. “I confiscated them from your jacket on our first case. Smoking is bad for your health.”

Ah, fuck, of course – Gavin _knew_ he had that pack. He’d figured it must have fallen out of his pocket or something, but it never occurred to him that Nines stolen it. And… kept it. Gavin flicks one out and lights it up. “Why give ‘em back now?”

Nines shrugs. “I know you better now than I did then.”

They fall back into silence, watching cars. Gavin chews on the filter of his cigarette and tries very hard not to think.

“I can smell him on you.”

Gavin shivers again, just like he had earlier in the evening. Nines doesn’t even look at him; he just observes, like he does at a crime scene, his voice low and terribly quiet.

“Get over it,” Gavin spits back, irritation coming easily. He’s a coward for hiding behind it, but it’s the only thing he knows. It’s the only shield he has for whatever dreadful, soft thing is growing inside him. “A guy’s got needs. Stop fuckin’ stalking me if it bothers you so much.”

He’d said it to piss Nines off, but it seems to have the opposite effect; Nines glances at him, and Gavin is stunned by how immensely _smug_ he looks.

“Stalking,” Nines echoes. “The idea of it arouses you, Detective.”

Gavin balks so violently that he drops his cigarette into the gutter. “Like fucking hell it does! Psycho.”

But Nines is unfazed, as always. “You enjoy the idea of me following you. Watching you. You enjoy the control that entails. Don’t you?”

Gavin opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. His dick is… hard. Painfully hard. The suddenness of it makes him feel faint. He closes his mouth and swallows; the way Nines is looking at him is penetrating, analyzing, and he knows that no matter what he says, Nines will see through him anyway. So he says nothing, because that seems like the safest thing to do.

Allowing Gavin a moment to gather his thoughts, Nines gets to his feet. “Get up,” he says. “I will take you home.”

Gavin grits his teeth. The thought of standing up with a raging boner isn’t exactly… ideal. But then Nines offers to carry him, and Gavin is forced to his feet. He endures the walk of shame to the taxi, more than aware of Nines’s amusement, which he makes no effort to hide. The drive back to Gavin’s apartment without speaking, but Nines’s eyes never leave him. Gavin begins to sweat again, but this time not from panic. He can barely control his breathing.

“Fuck off,” is the first thing Gavin says when he lets himself into his apartment; his cat crowds around his ankle, yowling something fierce. She doesn’t like when he goes out suddenly in the middle of the night, either. Just like Nines, she can smell the stranger on him. He hits the lights, wrestles off his jacket, and turns to face Nines. “There you fucking go! Welfare check done. You can go now.”

Nines does not smile. He pushes the door closed without so much as breaking eye contact, and Gavin feels pinned beneath it, like prey backed into a corner. “No,” Nines says.

 _Fuck_ , Gavin thinks weakly. He’d forgotten how fucking _huge_ the thing is – now it’s standing right there, almost chest-to-chest, and Gavin wonders what CyberLife was thinking building a robot like this. His may be almost exactly the same, but he is _nothing_ like Connor. Not by a long, long shot. Gavin has never felt this threatened by Connor, not even when he got his ass handed to him that one time.

“You are a fascinating human,” Nines murmurs, and Gavin shouldn’t find it as arousing as he does. Part of him is desperate to lean forward, to close the distance, to rut against the hard line of Nines’s thigh. Instead, Nines pushes him back. Gavin collapses onto the sofa. “Take it out.”

Gavin doesn’t have to ask what he means. Hands shaking, he works open his pants, taking his cock into hand. The first touch of skin is heavenly, and he drags in a breath through his teeth.

“Show me how you do it.”

Something in Gavin’s desire-addled brain falters. “H-huh?”

“Show me how you touch yourself,” Nines clarifies, his tone bordering on reproach. Gavin’s stomach lurches.

There’s something shameful in this – something humiliating about Nines just standing there, watching without shame of his own, like Gavin is some sort of exhibit. A sob trembles in Gavin’s throat as he fucks up into his fist.

“Look at me when you do it,” Nines says. _Demands_. Gavin raises his eyes, fixes them on that glacier-clear gaze, lets it eat away at him. His heart hammers against his ribs, in his throat, in each fingertip. It isn’t enough. He needs – more.

It’s not enough.

Gavin knows better than to beg. He knows that Nines won’t give him anything, no matter how nicely he tries to ask or how much he grovels. Nines was built to resist. His eyes long to drop in shame, his face burning with it, but something about the way Nines is looking at him keeps his gaze fixed. He reaches beneath him, touches his fingers to his hole. He can’t stand being empty. Nines eyes follow his movements and Gavin _burns._

One finger becomes two. Angled right, even when a cramp begins to pinch at his wrist, in memory of Nines’s fingers. His tongue is swollen between his teeth and he gazes at Nines with unseeing eyes, overwhelmed by the heat and the smell of his own sweat, the sensation of a third finger stretching him open. Nines gives nothing away, but there’s a heat in his eyes that wasn’t there before. Gavin rocks down onto his fingers, choking on a sob, chasing his climax. It’s sloppy and desperate, and before he knows it he’s coming all over his hand, head thrown back, throat glistening. His orgasm vibrates deep into his bones, penetrating deeper than it should, and he collapses in a boneless heap on the sofa again. A glance at the clock tells him the whole ordeal took less than five minutes.

“Thank you for the performance, Detective,” Nines says, and Gavin frowns at him, confused. The smile Nines gives him is catlike and barely-there. “I will store the data for later.”

Gavin’s stomach gives a lurch again. The fucker _recorded_ him. His dick (the traitor) chubs up a little.

He wishes Nines would call him _Gavin_ again.


	9. IX

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> UHHH SORRY FOR NOT UPDATING IN FOREVER i have no excuse i just forgot

Nines goes in alone when Howard recovers enough for questioning. His jaw is busted; he can’t talk, but Nines is very clear with him. There is fear in his eyes. Nines likes that.

He is given paper and a pen. “You will write the names and contacts of everybody involved in this operation,” he tells him, quietly, coolly. “If you do, we may be able to lighten your sentence. If you do not, then I will break a number of other bones in your body – I can assure you that they will be immensely more painful.”

Unsurprisingly, Howard does as he’s told.

“Why won’t you let me talk to him?” Gavin demands when he finds out. Nines is already busy logging the information and cross-referencing the database. “I’ve got some things to say to the fucker –,”

“His presence distresses you,” Nines interrupts him. They’re in the middle of the bullpen, but Nines has come to learn that Gavin rarely pays heed to ideas of public decency, especially when it comes to his temper. Gavin backs off, grimacing. He pauses, then, like he’s considering pushing on with it, but if he knows anything about the RK900, it’s that he isn’t easily convinced.

“So what did he give you?”

Nines makes a strange, internal humming noise. Gavin recognizes it; Connor makes the same damn sound whenever he’s pleased. “People of interest,” he replies. “The other man he was with – Ray Knowles – is an ex-CyberLife tech. It explains the tools and the knowledge.” He tilts his head; Gavin will always be a bit weirded-out by the way they can interface with terminals like that without moving. “It appears that their operations are centered down near the docks. There is enough for warrants – both for arrests and a raid.” He turns to face Gavin and smiles. A true, honest kind of smile that makes Nines’s eyes crinkle a bit at the corners and stuns Gavin into silence. He blinks as his brain struggles to process it. “Good work, Detective.”

Gavin makes a small, choked-off noise. “It – nothing’s closed yet, tin man,” he snaps.

Nines’s expression shifts; the tenderness hardens, but it isn’t unpleasant. It’s a reminder, Gavin realizes, and he swallows thickly. He turns on his heel to fuck off somewhere – _anywhere_ – and finds Hank smirking at him like he knows something.

Gavin doesn’t say anything. At this point he really doesn’t have the right. He just spits out a _phck!_ and heads outside for some air and a cigarette. The city thrums with life; he likes taking the time to come out and people-watch, though he doesn’t get the opportunity much these days. He watches the passers-by as they amble on with their own lives, and he thinks about Howard – he thinks about how he’d told Nines those things on purpose. It isn’t a mystery to Gavin. Somehow, Howard had seen the connection between the two of them – whatever that connection was – and wanted to destroy it. He saw it as something meaningful, and as far as Howard was concerned, Gavin didn’t deserve meaningful. He’d done the same shit back when they ran together, before Gavin cleaned up, before Fowler found him. The cigarette tastes stale. Phantom bruises still haunt him some nights – he still has scars from those days. Nines never asked him about it. Didn’t press him the way others sometimes did when they found out. Gavin’s past is a murky beast he despises dealing with, and keeping it chained down in the dark has always seemed the best way to do it. Now he isn’t so sure.

The whole thing wraps up with surprisingly little fanfare. Fowler isn’t surprised. He offers Gavin a somewhat sympathetic look, recognizing the weariness in his face, the shadows under his eyes. Because he knows – he knows where Gavin came from, the kind of people that helped shape him. He knows how hard Gavin has tried to escape that, even if it keeps coming around to bite him on the ass.

“You can never escape these sorts of things,” Fowler told him once. “It’s the kind of shit that’ll follow you to the grave. It’ll find you no matter how far or how fast you run. Better to realize that now, before it’s too late, and to become better despite it.”

He’s right, of course, and Gavin knows it.

Gavin is so consumed by introspection – something very rare, and something that Anderson always finds mind-boggling – that he doesn’t notice Nines wander out of the station and approach him. All he can think about is Howard and the things he’d said. All he can think about are the times he’d tried to get into meaningful relationships only to have them fucked up. He hates being pitied more than anything else, but when people find out, they always –

“I don’t… hate androids.”

Nines had come to a stop beside him, paused. His LED cycles once, twice, and something deep in his chest twitches. Gavin shifts his weight from foot to foot, antsy, and his face has turned a peculiar shade of pink; Nines has begun a catalogue of all Gavin’s unique expressions and colors, and he finds that Gavin’s blush is one of his favorites.

Gavin waves a hand and scoffs, leaning against the wall in a desperate attempt to not look awkward. “Howard, he – fuck. He’s a bully, and I – I guess I’m the same. I’m just so _angry_ , all the time, and I – I need someone to – something to project on, I guess.”

“A scapegoat,” Nines murmurs, and Gavin laughs humorlessly, chewing on his cigarette.

“Howard’s a fuckin’ bully. Takes it out on others, like – me. Used to take it out on me a lot when I was with ‘em. Now we’re back at square one, except it’s not him, it’s – it’s me.” His voice skips, tracking back over itself like a scratched disc, or corrupted data. Humans, machines… they’re not so different, Nines realizes. It’s all the same, in the end, software or hardware; it’s just electrical misfirings. “Androids were just – a convenience. Somethin’ it was okay to hate. They were easy, excusable. I could channel _everything_ into it and people just laughed it off. It felt good to mess them around. I felt – in control, I guess. Powerful. The usual old bully philosophy.” His laugh is humorless.

Nines bristles. Such things had been said in the past, in many different circumstances, and had led to more deaths than even Nines’s operating system could begin to compartmentalize. And yet, humans remained the same, and Gavin is only human, in the end.

“It is something you have come to realize,” Nines reasons. “And something, I think, you wish to improve upon.”

Gavin remains silent. The truth always weighed heavy; it was the worst truth because there _was_ no reason. He hated androids because it was convenient – rather than pursuing a healthy outlet for his anger, he had channeled it onto the marginalized like so many other assholes.

“For what it’s worth, Detective,” Nines says evenly; he can see Gavin slipping deeper by the second. His voice helps in bringing him back to the surface, and he looks at Nines with an open, surprised expression. “I think you have made progress.”

Gavin chews on the inside of his cheek. “Well, shit. Thanks, I guess.” He laughs, then, more of a sharp exhale than anything. It felt… _good_ getting that off his chest. To know that Nines doesn’t hate him even if he is a pathetic excuse of a human.

They return to the bullpen again, and even though Gavin feels about five hundred times more exhausted than he did before, he feels… better. Like a page had turned, cliché as it was. They see Fowler and talk briefly about the case, and then Nines brings Gavin a cup of coffee and says, “Officer Chen suggested that you and I celebrate closing this case. Would that be something you find amenable?”

Gavin stares at him dumbly, amazed. Nines – enormous, frowny-faced RK900 – _celebrating_? Gavin might have laughed if he’d been in a better mood. As it is, though, the mere thought of celebrating anything drains what little energy he has left. Nines might not have the same puppy-dog enthusiasm as Connor does, but he sure has the same unflappable sincerity that Gavin personally can’t stand. It sits strangely on his face, like he isn’t sure what to do with the feeling.

“Not this time,” he murmurs, rubbing his knuckles against his eyes. When he looks up, Nines is still staring in that weird unblinking way of his, and Gavin can tell he doesn’t understand. “I’m just – tired.”

They return inside and Nines sits down at his desk, adjacent to Gavin’s. He sits there and stares at him down the length of his nose. Thinking. Gavin can’t help but notice the perfection of his face (again) – it used to border on creepy, but Gavin’s used to it, now – with the same kind of dumbstruck admiration he’d laugh at, usually. He waits for Nines to argue, or to drown him in tech-talk that Gavin doesn’t have the juice to understand.

He doesn’t. Instead, he tilts his head owlishly, and says, “I will drive you home.”

It isn’t a request and Gavin doesn’t have it in him to argue.

The drive home is quiet. Gavin may be an asshole, but he’s no idiot – he knows Nines is trying to comfort him. He saw Gavin’s restlessness, his melancholy, and tried to mitigate it as only an android would. It might be endearing if it didn’t make Gavin so uncomfortable; he’s too used to Nines being _RK900_ , a military-grade police android, built like a tank, deceptively fast, and smarter than the rest of the DPD put together. He’s far less used to _Nines_ , a deviant who struggles to learn and relate to the human world, to humans, to _Gavin_. Where he used to find Gavin little more than a thorn in his side, he’s now tuning the radio onto some soft jazz bullshit and taking the quickest route back to Gavin’s flat, and it’s weird. It’s weird because Gavin’s starting to think that Nines likes him, and that’s something he knows will bottleneck him into treacherous territory.

He’s already in love, of course. He’s been deeply, painfully in love with Nines ever since he’d stepped on his dick in that bathroom.

Gavin doesn’t argue when Nines follows him along the breezeway to his door. He doesn’t argue when Nines follows him inside, or when he bends down to run his hand along the cat’s spine. She’s been alarmingly docile since Nines started showing up – she’d even start complaining when Nines has been away too long.

“What’s her name?” Nines asks, picking the yowling beast up into his arms. She purrs like a kicked-out engine, the fucking suck-up.

“Ripley,” Gavin replies. “Though I just call her ‘bitch’ most of the time. She answers to it.”

The glimmer of a smile turns at Nines’s mouth. “A reference to the movie _Alien_ , by Ridley Scott?”

Gavin’s in the kitchen by then, eating lunchmeat straight from the fridge. “Yeah,” he says around his mouthful, glaring at the beast currently crawling up around Nines’s shoulders. “Should’a named her after the cat, but I didn’t, because she’s a strong, independent woman, and also _Jones_ is a shit name.” He gives Ripley a pointed look. She hisses at him.

“I never gave much thought to movies,” Nines tells him. “Forming interests would take time and effort, since I am an effectively blank slate.”

Gavin pauses, wrinkling his nose. “You haven’t – what, you don’t have _any_ hobbies? Or shit that you like? Movies, music – I don’t know, _books_? Connor’s into that coin collecting bullshit, isn’t he?”

Nines gives him a measured look that Gavin can’t quite read. “You forget, Detective, that I was not granted any developmental years, and am still quite newly deviated. My software was never designed for interests or hobbies. It is – difficult. I was designed specifically not to deviate, and so I find the process to be… troublesome.” His voice skips strangely, as if breaking off and attempting to go elsewhere before he can pull it back to course. Gavin feels like an asshole, then, forgetting that Nines is less than a year old.

“I mean, I could – y’know. Give you some pointers. On movies and stuff. If you want.” The lunchmeat in his stomach feels like a bad decision. He sort of wants to throw it up.

And then Nines smiles at him – one of those rare, genuine smiles – and everything is okay again.

Gavin turns on the water a bit too hot in the shower. Not hot enough to scald him, but hot enough to be painful, to make him aware of his own body. It helps. The thought of Nines doting over his fucking cat does _not_ help. It’s all too surreal, like a dream Gavin is about to wrench awake from. Maybe, he thinks, when he gets out of the shower Nines will be gone, and his life will be just as shitty as it was before.

That is not what happens.

He gets out of the shower and instead of finding Nines gone, he finds Nines in his kitchen. There’s a sandwich on a plate, which Nines pushes towards him, eyeing him with the same disparaging wrinkle between his eyes. Gavin stares dumbly at the plate. Did – did a literal killing machine just –

“You need to eat something more nutritious than raw lunchmeat, Detective.”

To be honest, Gavin didn’t even know he had enough shit in his kitchen to _make_ a sandwich. But, hey, he’s never been one to turn down a free lunch, so to speak. “Thanks, nanny-bot.”

Nines’s LED flickers, but he doesn’t say anything. He waits, watching as Gavin eats, and then sets out food for Ripley, who has started trying to claw her way up his leg.

“You don’t have to, like – y’know, stick around. You’ve probably got better shit to do than babysit me,” Gavin mutters, half ashamed and half guilty for letting Nines take care of him like this. He’s never been good at – whatever this is. Being cared for. It makes him feel soft, and he hates feeling soft more than he hates most other things. Nines, though… he doesn’t strike Gavin as the type to do shit he doesn’t want to do.

“I don’t,” Nines tells him far more frankly than Gavin would like. He cringes a little at his honestly. “Outside work I have very little with which to occupy my time. As I said, I have no interests outside you.”

If Gavin was still eating, he would have choked. Something visceral wrenches in his gut, instinctive, primal. It’s like he’s been punched, the air shocked from his lungs, throat closing up tight. Fight-or-flight is the closest he can come to describing it. And the way Nines says it – like it’s just another fact he can rattle off, just another observation, like it’s _normal_.

“I thought you said you had no interests,” Gavin rasps.

Nines tilts his head again, considering. “I miscalculated.”

The space between them becomes very tense very quickly. Heavy; pregnant with things left unsaid. There is a promise there, in Nines’s too-clear eyes, and Gavin is reminded of their agreement with all the grace of an 18-wheeler.

_If you agree to work on this case properly, and if it is solved, then I will give you whatever you need._

Gavin’s mouth is bone dry. He can’t face this now. Not here, not like this, not –

“I should – I –,” He flails, swallowing thickly and taking a moment to gather his wits again. “I’m gonna turn in. You can – go, or stay, or whatever. Just don’t bother me.”

Nines inclines his head. “Sleep well, Detective.”

Gavin wishes he’d said his name instead.

Gavin’s sleep is black and dreamless. He wakes up sometime around mid-morning, if the angle of the sunlight is anything to go by. Ripley is howling up a storm at his door, scratching at the wood, and Gavin wonders very briefly if it really was just a dream. Then Ripley’s wailing stops, and there is the sound of a voice through the door, so quiet it’s unintelligible. Gavin recognizes the cadence immediately. Ripley stops caterwauling and Gavin’s pulse begins to race.

Nines stayed.

Part of him wants to stay in bed purely to avoid the robot in his living room. But he’s pressed for a piss, and he’s really fucking hungry, so eventually he scrapes up what little dignity he has left and shuffles out of his bedroom.

Seeing Nines first thing in the morning is enough to give him a headache. What’s worse, Ripley is sprawled over his lap pleased as can be, his hand anchored in the fur of her belly. _That’s not my cat,_ Gavin thinks, vaguely. “You traitorous little bitch,” he tells her instead.

Nines looks down at his lapful of cat and smiles fondly. “I like cats.”

Gavin, his headache bludgeoning behind his eyes, goes to piss without replying. He can’t get that fond little look out of his head.

Nines is still there when he’s done in the bathroom. He’s still there even despite Gavin’s greasy, unwashed hair, despite the mess his apartment is in, despite the mess his _life_ is in, despite the fact that Nines could be doing something so much more worthwhile with his time. Gavin tells him as much as he drinks the coffee Nines made him, and Nines fixes him with the same measured look he gave him the night before.

“Part of being deviant is the ability to make my own decisions,” Nines points out. “This is mine. I would ask you to respect that, Detective.”

Gavin grits his teeth. “Stop fuckin’ calling me that.” Nines pauses, looks at him, and Gavin flushes. “I mean – you can call me by my name. Off the clock and all.”

Another pause; the silence is too heavy, and Gavin almost gives in and books it. Then Nines nods, gives a little smile not too unlike the one he had given Ripley, and says, “All right. Gavin.”

Something inside Gavin _purrs_. Maybe he and Ripley aren’t so different after all.

“I brought you something,” Nines says, reaching out to pull a box across the counter; Gavin hadn’t noticed it there. Plain, square, modestly sized. Fuck. He hopes against hope that Nines hadn’t gotten him a fucking _gift_. As if Nines knows what he’s thinking, he adds, “It was a joke, I believe, from Connor and Lieutenant Anderson. However, given our previous interactions, I thought it may be… interesting.”

Gavin’s more scared now than he was before. Terrified, actually. At the mere mention of _previous interactions_ , though, something low in his gut clenches. He flips off the lid before he can have any second thoughts.

“What the fuck?”

Nines grimaces in agreement. He sees the abashed glow of Gavin’s face, his horrified expression, and can deduce enough from that; what he doesn’t see, though, is Gavin’s half-hard dick.

A fucking collar. A _leash_. Because of _course_ Anderson would do something like that, the old bastard. Every lukewarm feeling Gavin had towards Anderson vanishes, replaced once again with old-fashioned _fuck you, old man_.

And then – a thought.

“You didn’t throw this shit out?”

Nines’s grimace grows thin, spreading into something of a half-smile. “No.”

No explanation. No excuse. Just _no_.

The realization hits Gavin right in the dick. _Nines wants to collar him._

“Y-you know what this kind of shit means –,”

“From what I have read, acts involving these – _items_ – represents control. Ownership.” He says the last word very clearly, his ice-chip gaze driving it full-force into Gavin’s chest. His eyelids flutter, his sinuses stinging and his entire body reacting with a lance of arousal so strong that it’s a struggle not to double over.

“You promised,” Gavin rasps. “What I need.”

Nines does smile, then. Thin and knife-sharp. “I know what you need, Gavin. I can give it to you, if you let me.”

He’s asking for permission. Somehow it’s even worse than if he’d held Gavin down and took what he wanted. It’s worse because Gavin _feels_ it, deep in his chest. _I know what you need._ Because they know each other, now, well enough that Nines can anticipate things like that. Nines _knows_ him better than anyone really ever has, and most likely ever would. Gavin’s tongue is swollen and heavy, his heartbeat pounding in every finger, every toe, beneath every inch of skin. He feels overwhelmingly human in that moment.

He needs it.

“Please. Please, Nines.” It comes out as a croak; it doesn’t sound like him at all. It’s raw, as if the anxious mass of writhing organs inside him had been given voice. It’s a desperate, broken kind of sound. A plea. Please, _please_ –

Nines is, quite suddenly, very close to him. Close enough that Gavin can smell the strange, synthetic odorlessness all androids have, the faint traces of fabric softener of clothes only ever washed once. Gavin’s entire body flushes with heat. Nines reaches up and takes Gavin’s face in his hands, and for a moment Gavin thinks he might just kiss him – he doesn’t. He just _looks_ , because Nines is always looking at him with that even, considering gaze, like Gavin is something to be studied. Gavin finds it harder and harder to think with Nines’s breath washing over his mouth. It’s warm, like a human’s. Nines reaches behind him for the box.

Gavin’s mind is hazy as Nines fixes the collar around his neck. He swallows once, twice, his throat tight with arousal. He wants to suck Nines off again. To have Nines fuck his mouth, his throat. Christ, he wants it – wants it so bad he could die. He opens his mouth to speak, but Nines yanks the collar _hard_ , blowing a gentle _shhh_ against his mouth to hush him.

Deeply, deeply in love.

Gavin grips Nines’s wrists hard. Tries to pull his hands away; Nines’s grip won’t give, though, and he _smiles_ , showing a glimmer of teeth. Sharp teeth. It’s a threatening sort of smile that Gavin feels all the way down to his toes. His breath huffs out of his nose in short, explosive bursts. His pulse races. He knows Nines can feel it.

“Get on your knees,” Nines all but purrs, “and show me how much you need it.”

Gavin shivers and drops like a sack of stones. He’s never wanted to suck dick so much in his life – his hands tremble as they reach for Nines’s belt, but Nines slaps them away.

“No,” he tells Gavin. “You haven’t earned that privilege yet. Finger yourself.”

The punch is two-fold: Gavin has to _earn_ the privilege of sucking Nines off, of even _seeing_ his dick, and – _finger yourself._ The brusqueness of it is enough to have Gavin’s cock straining at his fly. A simple command, like _sit_ or _heel_. The collar around his neck suddenly feels twice as heavy.

He does it, though. Face-down, ass-up, breathing hard against the floor. His sweat pants are around his knees, his cock hard and leaking between his legs, and he truly can’t bring himself to care. Every single cell in his body thrums, vibrating like a plucked cord, and when he glances back over his shoulder Nines is leaning against the kitchen counter with his arms folded, infuriatingly casual. He’s smirking, just a little, like he knows _exactly_ the effect he has on Gavin.

Gavin feels small. Vulnerable. Pathetic. He _hates_ it.

(He loves it).

Gavin’s fingers aren’t the same as Nines’s, though. They’re too human – too rough and clumsy, his forearm cramping, unable to reach the right spots. He wishes they were Nines’s fingers. Nines’s cock, carving him inside out. He groans at the thought.

“Who would have thought you’d become so docile,” Nines muses. The sole of his foot comes down on Gavin’s backside, pressing into the flesh there and forcing his hips down, down, until his fingers slip free of his hole and his dick grinds against the floor. He’s so _empty_. His hole is soft and wet and begging for something – for Nines. “I knew you could be taught to obey. Fowler knew it, too. He knew I could bring you to heel.”

Gavin’s cock jerks between his hip and the floor, drooling precome. His head swims. Of course Fowler knew what Gavin was like – he, of all people, understood Gavin Reed’s hair-trigger nature, and knew the sort of discipline Gavin needed. Constant, persistent, _unforgiving_ discipline; he needed somebody who wouldn’t fold easily. It was something nobody could provide. Nobody except an android. Nobody except RK900.

And now here he is, whimpering and furious at his own manipulation, grinding his dick into the floor. Nines had played his cards perfectly, and Gavin had _let_ him.

“I’m the only one worthy of your obedience.”

Gavin pauses. Nines said it like – like it was a gift Gavin had chosen to give him. The insinuation makes his heart grow warm and large in his chest; the sensation is unfamiliar, too tender to be comfortable, and Gavin chokes on it. He wants to throw it up like he’d throw up rotten food, too sweet, unpalatable. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t. He does nothing as Nines takes his foot away and moves around to crouch by his shoulders. Gavin glances up at him and grimaces. Nines takes his chin into a cool, pale hand, stroking over Gavin’s lips far too gently.

“Fuck me,” Gavin rasps, his hole clenching. “I need – I need it. Need you. Please.”

Nines makes a pitying noise in the back of his throat. Usually Gavin would start throwing punches at things like that, but all he can do now is lean into Nines’s palm and let warmth spread through him. “I’ll do anything,” he says hoarsely. He has to swallow just to get the words out. “Whatever you want.”

Nines gives him one of those long, measured looks. “You know – I always assumed this would go differently. Rougher. Similar to the incident at the station. I know what you like, Gavin, and I know what you need. I never expected I would –,” Nines pauses, then, Gavin’s eyes drawn to the flashing amber of his LED. It spins and spins and spins.

“What?” Gavin demands, still a little breathless. He thinks he caught a flicker of red there, just for a moment, but it’s so brief that it could have easily been a trick of the light. Nines grimaces and does not meet his gaze.

“That I would become – invested. Personally.”

_Personally._

Gavin’s head rings. Nines’s face is so close that he can see each eyelash, each crease of his forehead, the very fibers of his irises. Gavin’s mouth goes dry again and every single thought drops clean from his brain. _Fuck, he’s handsome_. His attention is drawn to Nines’s hand, which grips his wrist just a little too tight, leading Gavin’s hand to his crotch.

Fuck. He’s hard. He’s _really_ hard.

The slightest flush of color sits high on Nines’s cheeks. His hair unfurls over his forehead, throat shivering as he swallows, and for a moment he looks overwhelmingly human. Gavin wants nothing more than to touch him. To kiss him. To just – be with him.

“Don’t be gentle,” Gavin pleads. “Don’t go getting fuckin’ – soft on me.”

Nines clings to the ledge Gavin offers. His hand, which had been lying tenderly against Gavin’s cheek, drops to grab at his throat. Gavin balks, swallows, and grins.

“You don’t deserve soft, Gavin.”

Gavin almost moans with delight as Nines fists his other hand in his hair and yanks him up onto his knees. The collar sits heavy around his neck, a constant reminder. Gavin presses his face to the front of Nines’s trousers, tucking his nose against the bulge, snarling in protest as Nines drags him away from it.

“Come on,” Gavin wheezes. “Stop fucking around – !”

Nines scowls down at him; there’s a real twitch of irritation and Gavin can’t help but grin. He’s always been one to push limits.

“Stop running your mouth,” Nines growls down at him, and Gavin doesn’t think he’s ever heard his voice drop that low before. He shudders, muscles clenching.

“Why don’t you put it to better use, tin man?”

The twitch grows deeper.

Nines makes quick work of his pants. He only uses one hand, the other remaining anchored in Gavin’s hair, and Gavin can’t help but be turned on by the precise speed of the fingers as they work open the front of Nines’s pants. And then his dick – his perfect, wet-dream dick – slaps wetly against Gavin’s cheek. He moans.

Gavin closes his fist around Nines’s cock and guides the head to his lips. He suckles at it, placing a number of sloppy, open-mouthed kisses down the shaft, drowning in the hefty girth of it. He’d complain about whatever pervert decided to equip him with a dick like this later – for now, he intends to enjoy it.

The fist in his hair tightens to the point of being painful. Gavin growls, though the sound is broken off as Nines shoves his face against the fine hair at the base of his cock. Gavin breathes; usually, this is where the smell is strongest, but instead of a human, meaty headiness, there’s… nothing much. Somehow it’s even more arousing to know that Nines isn’t human – that he’s some super-OP robot who could break him into a million little pieces if he felt like it.

When Gavin drops to mouth at his balls, jerking him off with a slick fist, Nines chuckles. When he first met Gavin Reed, he’d never thought he would end up looking down at him like this – he never thought he would see him so debauched, so willing to humiliate himself for Nines’s pleasure. He can’t say he doesn’t enjoy the view, though.

“Open,” he says, levering Gavin back onto his knees and hooking a thumb behind his lower incisors. Gavin’s mouth opens easily, beautifully, his tongue lathing against the pad of Nines’s thumb. Nines’s components give a surge at the memory of the last time Gavin sucked him off. He guides the head of his cock to sit on Gavin’s lips, savoring the sight for a moment or two before pushing – slowly – inside.

 _Don’t be gentle,_ Gavin had said. Nines bites down on a smirk. He has no plans of letting Gavin off easy.

Nine’s hands are _big_. They’re slender, yes, but his fingers are long and his palms are broad, and he has little trouble holding Gavin’s head in place as he fucks his mouth. At first, his thrusts are slow, exploring the limits of what Gavin can take. Those eyes remain on him, challenging wordlessly, and they spur heat up the back of Nines’s neck. Somehow Gavin can manage to annoy him even when his dick is half-way down his throat. His movements grow rapid. Harder. Fucking Gavin’s mouth up and down his length until it glistens with spit, until Gavin is gagging and his eyes are streaming with tears, until his nose is running and his entire body jerks with the effort not to vomit.

“Don’t even think about it,” Nines warns him, his voice low and reverberating oddly with static. “You will clean up whatever mess you make. With your tongue.”

Gavin’s eyes roll a little. His moan is lost around the cock in his throat.

It’s good. It’s so – _fucking_ good. Nines could lose himself in the sensation, in the flood of data. Pressure builds within him, power condensed into cables that are too thin and too few to contain it; there are sparks, and heat, and his fans struggle to keep up with his ever-rising core temperature. Gavin’s hair begins to tear in his grip, and his face shudders with pain, but Nines doesn’t stop. He _can’t_ stop. He fucks Gavin’s throat hard and sloppy and then something _bursts,_ and Nines’s vision drops away into an error display.

He's coming. He’s coming _hard_ , right down Gavin’s greedy throat. Gavin gulps it down, his dick so hard it’s painful, fingers scrabbling at Nines’s thighs as he struggles to breathe. When Nines’s vision comes back online, the first thing he sees is Gavin’s face, flushed deep and brilliant and beautiful, Nines’s cock still buried to the hilt.

Nines draws back, pulls out, and Gavin falls onto his hands in desperation to breathe. Drool and synthetic lubrication sluice from his mouth and nose. His body heaves. Then he looks up at Nines, his eyes swollen, and he says nothing.

He doesn’t need to.

“Present,” Nines rasps – honest to God _rasps_ , sounding almost out of breath – as he fists his cock, which is already growing hard again. “I am going to fuck you right here, on this floor, until you are unable to think straight. Do you understand?”

Gavin’s eyes drop shut. _Christ on a bike._ He can’t even fucking speak – all that comes out is a hoarse moan. He lifts himself onto trembling limbs, turning onto his front and letting his torso drop to the floor. Nines’s palm slides up his spine, coming to rest between his scapulae, impossibly strong and impossibly hot against his skin, slick with sweat. The other hand goes to Gavin’s hole, feeling around it, and Nines exhales harshly then it takes his fingers eagerly. He locates Gavin’s prostate immediately, pressing down against it and _stroking_ , once, twice. Then his fingers are gone, leaving Gavin practically sobbing with need.

“Beg,” Nines snarls. “ _Beg._ ”

“Please, oh my God, _please_ fuck me, I’ll – I’ll fucking _die_ –,” The words pour from him. He doesn’t even need to think about it. Nines’s body thrums with pleasure, his dick fully hard again, still slippery from Gavin’s throat. There’s no lube; they both knew this wouldn’t be gentle. They didn’t want it to be.

Gavin’s hiss melts into a moan as Nines presses inside him in a single, deep stroke. His body angles away from the pain, but Nines’s hands – one at his hip, the other at his shoulders – keep him firmly anchored. There’s… so much of him. He’s so _full_. He almost feels sick with it.

Sobbing, Gavin comes. Nines feels it in the way his body clenches down, and if he didn’t have such discipline – if he wasn’t an android – he might have come too. Instead, he watches with rapture as Gavin jerks on his cock, fucking himself back on it through his orgasm. When he tries to lift himself from Nines’s dick, however, Nines’s hands hold him firm, flush against his pelvis.

“You came already,” Nines says in wonderment. His spine tingles with the sensation of Gavin’s hot, clenching insides. “Just from that.”

Gavin glares at him over his shoulder. Nines retaliates by thrusting sharply into him, rewarded by Gavin’s punched-out groan. Gavin’s elbows tremble, his skin glistening with sweat, glimmering like the ocean with each ripple of muscle. He’s so sensitive it _hurts_ , but he’s already getting hard again.

Then Nines starts fucking.

Gavin is no stranger to android strength; hell, he’d witnessed Connor – a _twink_ – lift up Hank fucking Anderson without breaking a sweat. He’d seen androids do all kind of super-human shit, so it shouldn’t surprise him when Nines begins fucking him well beyond any human measure of stamina. Even so, all his breath is knocked clean from his lungs in a low groan; the octaves stutter with each impact. Nines fucks hard and _deep,_ God, so deep – Gavin can feel it in every cell of his body. He hasn’t been fucked like this in _years._

A hand fists in his hair. Mashes his face into the carpet as Nines levers his weight over him, using it to drive down into him again and again and again. Gavin sees stars, then he sees nothing, his blood flowing as thick and unbearably hot as magma. All he can do is breathe. Feel. Can’t speak – can’t think.

“You’re _mine_ ,” Nines snarls, voice jolting with the force of his thrusts. He scrapes his nails down Gavin’s back just to see the angry red lines that rise in their wake. Gavin chokes on a sob, his arm swinging back to seize Nines’s wrist. He doesn’t move it, doesn’t direct it – he just holds on. “Say it. _Say it._ ”

Gavin doesn’t think twice. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to. “Yours,” he rasps. “I’m yours. Yours. Fuck, Nines – !”

That does it. That single, pathetic whine of his name does Nines in completely, and he’s coming _hard_ , holding himself flush inside Gavin’s hole as he does, flooding him better than a human ever could. He lets his head tip back, sighing with pleasure as it arcs through each circuit, along each filament, each biocomponent. It settles hot in his pump regulator, which works frantically to keep up with the sensory input.

Nines lets himself drown in it.

When he comes to again, Gavin is breathing hard against the floor, eyes black and brilliant as they gaze at him beneath lowered eyelids. He hasn’t come yet, but by the looks of his flushed, wet cock, he isn’t far off. Nines, seized by a sudden desire he can’t seem to control, pulls out and spends a second admiring the creamy smear of Gavin’s well-fucked hole. Then he flips him onto his back, settling himself between Gavin’s thighs until the wiry hairs brush his ears and his sensors press beneath the weight of the sensory input. He can _smell_ him. He can feel the heat. Before Nines can stop himself – before he can even think about what he’s doing – he closes a hand around Gavin’s balls and _squeezes._

Gavin shouts a long, harsh line of expletives. Nines smiles fondly.

He goes lower, then, tonguing at Gavin’s hole and tasting his own spend there. He enjoys the way the muscle flexes around his tongue, like it’s fluttering, or trying to suck him in deeper. Gavin rides his face with abandon, his breath a chorus of “fuck, fuck, fuck”s; it takes only a few hard strokes of Nines’s hand before he’s coming all over himself, back arching, muscles seizing. He makes another one of those pained noises, and as far as Nines is concerned, it’s the most beautiful sound he’s ever heard.

Gavin falls boneless against the floor, sweaty and dizzy. He takes a while to catch his breath, head spinning with everything that had just happened. He’s never been fucked like that in his life, not even that one time he visited the Eden Club. When he finds the strength to raise his head, he finds Nines sitting on his knees, just staring at him. It would be creepy if Gavin didn’t know him better – and if Nines didn’t look so fucked-out.

For a moment Gavin is transfixed. Nines’s gaze is scalding, despite his eyes being the color of ice. His expression is heavy, dangerously affectionate, his hair mussed, skin flushed. Too close to real. His LED flickers yellow, and Gavin lifts his foot to nudge it against the little spinning light; Nines catches his ankle and presses a kiss to his calf.

“You look fuckin’ good like that,” Gavin says hoarsely, his mouth spreading into an obnoxious grin. The openness of Nines’s face narrows again, and he flashes a quicksilver smile of his own. It’s a lovely thing, Gavin thinks. “Should fuck you out more often.”

Nines doesn’t respond. Instead, he thinks – Gavin doesn’t know what he’s thinking about, but his LED keeps jumping between blue and yellow, even when Nines lowers his body down over Gavin’s and puts their faces very close together. A hand rises to pull at Gavin’s collar; he’d forgotten he was even wearing it.

“I intended to leave this as a singular incident,” Nines confesses. The depth of his voice – the impossible echo of it – made Gavin shiver. “However, that plan is compromised.”

“You sayin’ you wanna be fuckbuddies?” Gavin asks, swallowing down the thrill that rose sharp in his throat. “I thought we already crossed that line.”

But Nines pauses, frowns, and his LED cycles yellow for longer than it should.

“Unless – you _don’t_ wanna be fuckbuddies.”

The air between them is hot. Close. Magnetized; Nines leans down a fraction further to put his mouth against Gavin’s cheek. It isn’t quite a kiss, but it’s worryingly close to one. Gavin knows he should complain – he doesn’t _do_ feelings. At least, he _didn’t_ until this robo-twunk came along and fucked up his life.

“I want to be – something,” Nines says, haltingly, against his cheek. Gavin grows very still, his heart pounding. “I care about you. I want – I want to make sure you operate at peak capacity.”

Despite everything, Gavin laughs. Here he is, ass-naked in his living room with a still mostly-dressed android murder-bot on top of him, and he’s laughing. But, damn it, if it isn’t hilarious in the moment – Gavin knows what Nines is trying to say, but he really did have to say it in the most _Nines_ way possible.

Gavin’s hand is on the back of Nines’s neck, then, skirting his hairline. Warm, heavy. Human. Nines catches his eye and, for the first time Gavin can remember, looks nervous. “Let me have you,” he says, and Gavin grins again, wide and feral.

“To be honest, you had me the first time you stepped on my dick. And I –,” Gavin swallows. _Say it, you fucking coward!_ “You’re not all that bad, y’know, I guess. Bearable, sometimes. And Ripley likes you, so –,”

Nines kisses him. It’s an awful kiss. Gavin starts laughing again.

“You really suck at that,” he chuckles. Then he leans in and kisses Nines, very gentlly, upon the mouth. “S’pose I could teach ya.”

Nines looks at him like he’s the most amazing thing in the world.

“Thank you, Gavin,” he says. “I would like that very much.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i feel like the case ended up being a bit anti-climactic but a) who could be bothered? not me and b) sometimes life be like that
> 
> anyway! hope you enjoyed! i know i sure had fun writing this :p


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